Roaming Christmas blog.

More items from the past. December 29, 1996.

Christmas has slipped by, and anno Domini 1996 almost has too. We stayed in Chicago for the holiday this year, which was fine. Nice and quiet. Got to stop bouncing around for Xmas. It occurred to me that I've spent every Christmas in a different place since I first went to Japan in 1990. Before that, they were all in Texas.

1990: Osaka. 1991: Canberra, Australia. 1992: Dallas. 1993: Nagasaki. 1994: London. 1995: Arlington, Mass.

This represents a range of circumstance, too, from a complete gathering of my family, which was very good (Dallas), to the trough of an unemployed Christmas (Arlington). Christmas in Japan might sound exotic, but Christmas in Australia really was. That day I strolled to the edge of Canberra and watched a summer sunset from atop a dusty hill.

My first Christmas in Japan, I had to work, and before the day was out, a crew came by and stripped the place of its Christmas decorations, which were marginal in the first place. We were tourists in Nagasaki for Xmas '93, and tourists in London the next year. In both cities, we attended a Christmas Eve service in an enormous cathedral -- Urakami Cathedral, the largest church in Japan, and completely rebuilt after the second atomic bombing knocked it down; and the next year, St. Paul's, which has survived everything since the 1660s.

2003 Postscript: I got my wish. We've passed Christmas in the Chicago area each year since I wrote that, excepting perhaps 1999, when Yuriko and Lilly were in Osaka, and I was here (that was the worst of them, but we couldn't help it).