Christmas Dinner

Travel Memoir

When I arrived in Madrid a week before Christmas 1972 I expected to be a backpacking tourist in Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam before returning home in two weeks to finish business school. The trip went off the rails before I left the Iberia Airlines terminal to hitch into town. As I poked my head through the exit a blast of snow poked me back. I could barely see the red, silver and gold Christmas lights that adorned the airport through the blizzard that was tormenting Europe. 

I didn't wait around for the weather to change. Within an hour I was on a bus to Torremolinos, a small hippie haven beach town on the Mediterranean fictionalized in Michener's novel, The Drifters. It wouldn't be Paris but it would be warm. When the weather changed I'd head north to Amsterdam to catch my flight back to Toronto. 

Torremolinos disappointed. Instead of being a rocking beach town, it was a decaying tourist trap built into a barren hillside overlooking a tiny harbor, home to a few dozen rickety fishing boats. My search for drifters was like a dream where you're near what you're looking for, but you can't find it, no matter how many doors you open. When I asked where all the drifters were, people pointed west, up the coastal highway towards Marbella. 

Marbella disappointed. Too much like Palm Springs where I had spent spring break as an undergraduate. My enduring vision of Marbella is four raucous teenage boys in a Cadillac convertible cruising the overly lit main drag in search of similarly inclined girls. I'd outgrown that. Too bright. Too loud. Too expensive. 

I continued westerly toward the south of Portugal hoping to find a hot, undiscovered beach town. But I was hitch-hiking, so fate intervened, and a day later I found myself in Algeciras, a gateway city from Europe to North Africa. A ferry ride away from Morocco. 

Algeciras had a beach, but more to my liking a seedy international port area populated by rough looking down and out mariners keeping cheap bars, crummy hotels and dark-haired prostitutes in business. I liked this other side of the tracks, the side I’d previously seen in cities like Kabul and New Delhi where I could absorb the sanctity and misery of older civilizations up close. I stayed in Algeciras long enough to soak in the ambiance and then hopped on the ferry to Morocco to take me to Marrakesh and Casablanca. I was so close. I had to scratch my impulse to see them. 

On my way to Marrakesh I paused in Fez on Christmas eve. There, I found a community of vagabonds, like me, chasing a variety of dreams that kept them far from home at Yuletide, but still in search of family. On a whim a few of us decided that Christmas dinner would be a good idea. Someone, not me, took over the planning and assigned tasks. Location was no problem. We were hanging out in a park in the city centre, dusty but inviting enough. We could put a few park benches together, near a fire pit, to serve as a dining room and kitchen. My assignment was buying the turkey and killing it. I'd like to say a YouTube showed me how to, but that was not an option in 1972. It took a couple of us to calm and hang the bird from a tree branch and then, with nervous jerky movements, I cut diagonally and deeply across the screeching bird's windpipe. There was no eye contact.

Our Christmas dinner connected thirteen people from eight countries in Europe, North America and Australia. We joyfully shared a traditional meal with camaraderie and familial affection deep in the heart of North Africa. 

The next day I headed south, further from Amsterdam, driving with an Aussie couple, John and Rita, on their way to Marrakesh and beyond. 

. . . to be continued