A few years ago I took a night before the night before Christmas helicopter ride to where the spirits are high and the air is thin, Mt. Everest. This is a short excerpt from "Gone Astray" an audio book of my stories that will be released by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange on iTunes and on CD early next year and distributed public radio stations.
Talk about a holiday escape. A few years ago I flew from the real Bethlehem, in the Middle East, to Brazil's Bethlehem, a town called Belem at the mouth of the Amazon where after some Christmas shopping at a rather funky, politically-incorrect market, I began a jungly yuletide cruise. Have a look at a Flash video and some pictures.
I’m sure, if you are over 18 you have spent some holiday season away from home. A few years ago I flew to Frankfurt, Germany the day before US Thanksgiving for a 1/2 hour business meeting. The meeting was a bust and alone, in a terrible mood, on a bone-chilling afternoon I boarded a train for Heidelberg, where the Student Prince was alive and quite drunk.
The celebrities in Rockefeller Plaza are quite a distance away. They are next to the giant Christmas tree on the plaza, waiting for it to light up. We are stuck in a line, a block away, playing cat and mouse with New York's finest who are half-heartedly trying to get us to move on. My wife has become quite a star herself.leading the nearby mob in a chorus of "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer."
One guy yelled "shaddup! I hate dat song."
The tree lit up, everybody cheered, we moved away with the mass into one of New York's biggest weekends. We went in search of Santa.
Where do you go to find a spirited Christmas celebration? Give me Fiji any day. As the temperature teases the freezing tick on the thermometer and our two cats, Max and Moritz stalk the house, looking for non-existant pools of light, my mind floats on the trade winds to Fiji sunshine. I am a great fan of Fiji. I courted my wife on a cruise of Fiji's islands in 1997, but ten years earlier I went there to do a documentary for American Public Radio and NPR that was supposed to have been a Christmas special featuring Fiji's magnificent a capella choirs, but ended up as a rather strange tale of island politics: two coups d'etat, me being suspected of being CIA, a strange encounter with a drunken German arms dealer, unzoweiter, unzoweiter...but that's a long story.
The program was an hour long, but I have shortened and updated it. A major part of the 16 1/2 minutes features the music of the Fiji islands, recorded on both trips, ranging from a Fijian drinking song to familiar Christmas carols sung in Fijian. I would guess that there are few Fijians who cannot sing...magnificently. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and joy during this holiday season.
