Christmas in Thailand

This essay was first written for the St. Charles Writers Group on December 22, 2018.

The first stamp in my first passport is dated December 24, 1985. It states: “Immigration. Bangkok. Tourist.” I was five years old.

My mother was twenty-nine years old, my father thirty-six, and my younger brother, Seth, had recently turned two. Except for my father, it was the first time we had flown anywhere internationally. Imagine: my mother, a slight, blond-haired, blue-eyed young woman, married to an Asian man just ten years after interracial marriage was deemed federally legal by the Supreme Court in 1967, on a plane for over twenty hours with a kindergartener and a toddler. She had no idea what it would be like where she was going; she’d never known anything besides the four seasons of Chicago; it was Christmastime and she was going to meet her in-laws who spoke a foreign language. Our first trip lasted over three weeks.

In my passport photo, I am a mischievous-looking little girl with black bangs and a pale pink pinafore. I have a closed-lipped smile, like I am suppressing a silly secret; I am slouching like I’d rather be swinging from a jungle gym than posing in my fancy dress. I have been told that we will go visit my father’s family, that we will fly on a plane. We will spend Christmas with mysterious other grandparents and aunts and uncles. I’ll get to go swimming a lot. Swimming! In December. It must have felt like a story.

I vaguely remember Seth not yet a toddler on the plane and then him with my family, each person holding him and cooing at his pale skin and dark brown eyes and hair. My grandfather, known as a wise man of sorts, pronounced that my brother had the potential to be the President of the United States of America, the most renowned country in the world. A boy in the family was a blessing.

These memories are blended with other Christmases in Thailand when my brother and I were older. I have stamps in the same passport book from December 18, 1987, with a final return stamp from O’Hare International Airport on January 8, 1988. That is the Christmas I think I asked for a Barbie. She was a special Barbie whose ball gown, puffed like Scarlett O’Hara’s around slim plastic legs, did double duty as a little pouch with a draw string handle. My mother wrapped the doll in its box in shiny holiday paper back in America and placed it into a suitcase for me to open on Christmas. Our presents took up space with all the gifts from America we would bring to my family members. Of course, in those days I must have thought Santa brought my doll all the way from the North Pole.

That trip I can recall the Thai shopping malls at Christmastime. Thais, predominantly Buddhists, don’t observe Christmas. Plus, the weather in Thailand, a country not far from the equator, is continually humid with temps in the 90s. My adorable, tiny, grey-haired grandmother with coke-bottle glasses would urge her Midwestern American granddaughter to wear a sweater after the sun set and the temperature dipped into the 80s. While I couldn’t comprehend her words, she was always able to communicate her meanings. There was no possibility of a white Christmas for us in Bangkok. But the malls are a phenomenon of their own, air-conditioned, multi-storied temples dedicated to commerce, often with waterparks built on the roof, where one can find the kitschy aspects of the popular Western holiday, Muzak Christmas songs piped over loudspeakers, colorful lights strung along the rails of the escalator lobby, even fake spray-paint snow dressing storefront windows. That year I also received pirated Debbie Gibson and Madonna tapes bought at one of those malls.

My next passport has stamps dated in January 1993. I don’t know why we traveled after winter break when my brother and I were both in school. I kept a journal that time, and I don’t mention school at all.

My third passport dates the final time I ventured to Thailand at Christmastime, though not my last visit, landing in Bangkok on December 8, 1997, with return to Chicago on December 25 the same year. By that time, I was a surly teenager, too much black eyeliner and a sullen expression, anxious to be back with my friends. My mother stayed home that trip to take care of the pets. My father, brother, and I traveled around Thailand with my uncle and his family, staying in thatch-roofed huts on remote islands and snorkeling in bays with brightly colored fish. It would be the last time I would ever see my grandfather. When we arrived home on Christmas, the first thing we saw was my mother had fashioned a makeshift altar to us out of framed photographs on the kitchen island. I remember thinking, She missed us.

The song says, There’s no place like home for the holidays. But when you are a person with family on two sides of the planet, home is harder to define. For me, Christmas was once as much about snow as it was about swimming. Pajamas in the morning around an evergreen tree dotted with ornaments, or a breakfast of mango and sticky rice on a patio with people I can only partially communicate with but know I belong to.

Christmas means family, it means love, and to me that means the world.