When You’re Far Away from Home on the Holidays.

How Being Abroad Brings New Meaning to Old Traditions from Home.

It was Thanksgiving Day, 1989, sleety and wet, a palette of grays. I remember Bratislava, the capital city of the newly freed Republic of Slovakia, as cold and empty, not knowing quite how to wake up from its communist isolation, for this was also the year that the 40 year-plus Moscow-imposed soviet control over Eastern and Central Europe collapsed. Slovaks were now free to run their own country, make a mess of it or not, it was now up to them. And I was there to help in the cultural transition from a command-and-control economy to a free one. It was like this: when a bowl of oranges appeared at the table at the end of the meal, they were gone in a nanosecond; for no one had had fresh oranges for years. The streets were deserted most of the time, as there were few items on store shelves to go out to buy. The occasional tram would lumber by, and the one I jumped on this Thanksgiving Day took me down through the snow to the local government run telephone kiosk, where, once I paid the clerk for my phone call back home to the States ahead of time and gave them the number I wanted them to call, I would wait for them to assign me a booth in which to go to to receive my call. When my wife and daughter answered the phone in the States, I felt as if I might as well have been on the moon, so far away, so…