It was Christmas week in Lisbon, and I found there was a delinquent gift for someone who’d expect it. “Pete, I thought you had bought that?” was followed by “Wait, I thought you’d bought that,” and we each ended up conceding procrastination, placing full blame on December’s busyness.

I note that this is remarkably out of character for me. Growing up in the Fisher household, I understood it was not recommended to engage in Christmas shopping much after Thanksgiving in order to avoid the lines and living on the wild side in general. But the Portuguese proclivity for liassez-faireness must be making its mark on me, almost imperceptibly, like the lilt of the local dialect seeping into one’s mother tongue. This is how I explain my gift shopping excursion on the evening of December 23^rd.

That evening, it was raining in Lisbon. Still, I laced up my sneakers and went by foot, umbrella in hand. The thought of driving through a city whose streets incubate southern Europe’s angriest drivers, with motorists experiencing peak Christmas stress, seemed ill-advised. I walked slowly, slipping up and down Lisbon’s undulating mosaic sidewalks on that damp Friday.

A young man with a blonde top-knot was walking towards me on the sidewalk as I made my way to the city center. He made eye contact, in what was an obvious appeal for directions. I removed my headphones and silenced the summary of the newest tax plan iteration. Did I speak English? The man spoke with an accent that I identified as German. There was a brief silence.

He looked at his shoes, sheepishly. “You look very fashionable today. I just had to tell you” he said. “I’m an art student from Sweden, and I think that your outfit is just awesome.”

“Thanks so much,” I said. “I’m dying to visit Sweden.”

The art student laughed. “Well, don’t go for Christmas. Now there are only four hours of daylight. That’s why I’m here! I’m somewhere new every time I can be. This year is Christmas in Lisboa, where I can eat pasteis de nata on the terrace of my Air BnB in a t-shirt. Anyway, have a great day!”

The Swede, who in my mind is called Nils, waved and disappeared into a coffee shop. Maybe to buy his pasteis de nata.

The idea of Sweden for Christmas got me thinking to the Christmases I’ve spent elsewhere. I began to try recalling my 33 Decembers, and it struck me they are marked by a form of nomadism. Where have I been? Where have these 33 Christmases gone? I wandered through Chiado distractedly, reflecting on the nature of time and place. The unpleasantries of last minute gift shopping fell to the wayside. My mind was on Decembers past.

There was the time my sister Sarah, my cousin Florencia and I cross-dressed as the Three Wise Men and forced my younger brother to play baby Jesus in the manger. (Who said the Wise Men couldn’t have been women? I happen to be a big fan of gold, frankincense and myrrh.) We were spending Christmas at our grandparents’ house in a small rural town in Chile. My grandparents had neither cable nor computers, just a landline, in which we were not interested. We created our fun. We must have been about 10 or 11 years old. Freddy is seven years my junior and his self-defense skills were at the time nonexistent. We wrapped him in a white mattress cover and told him to lay very still in a manger staged on the kiddie four-wheel drive that was left ‘parked’ at our grandparents’ for communal cousin use. All adults supervising the Christmas festivities were informed there would be a show that night, just before it was time to set out cookies for Santa Claus. Of course we knew the adults had no option but to support our budding theatre troupe, so we charged 400 pesos per ‘ticket’ drawn in crayon cut from sheets of lined paper. The proceeds gave us enough money to split on a Christmas candy spree at the country store across the street, which had no name, so we called it La Tienda Del Frente. That Christmas is the last time I’ve gotten involved with a manger of any sort, and I have my suspicions the same applies to baby Jesus and my two Wise Men counterparts.

There was that Christmas we spent in a very special place – let’s call it Cherokee – on a small island that’s home to quiet beaches blanketed in fine, off-pink sand. There were no Christmas soundtracks playing at the shopping centers because there were no shopping centers. It was Christmas as I like it best, with that day’s catch – grouper and conch – on the wood dining table, my bare feet on the floor, the sound of crashing waves coming through the screen door we’d left open. After dinner, I went for a walk on the beach, able to navigate the shore thanks to a generous, wonderful moon in full. A starfish the size of my foot had washed up on the sand. It was alive, a textured, deep red. I carefully picked it up and returned it to the ocean. That night, I dreamt I was an astronaut, tethered to a spaceship but outside of it, floating in the universe with a view to that night’s moon.

I spent a couple of Christmases in Paris while I worked as a bottom-rung lawyer and had no holiday season priority. There were the annual Christmas office parties that I recall best for their raspberry-flavored macaroons, cheese cart and brut champagne. One year, the law firm rented out a big name hotel in Versailles for an office retreat in the lead-up to Christmas, where we each had a room for the evening. There was an elegant dinner the first night, to which I wore a new pair of impossibly high heels that were entirely worth the physical discomfort for making me feel gorgeous and a little more French.  Dinner became dancing, and the catwalk footgear became a terrible decision. I went to bed early that night, with new blisters on my bloodied toes. The rest of the office crew, I was told, ended up at a strip bar by Versailles Palace, with rumors of married partners inviting dancers back to the hotel in the knowledge that their significant others remained with the kids in Paris.

Then came Christmas weekend, and the city turned quiet. Snow, which took on the grey-blue tint of the sky above, draped the city. I spent the day walking through it, which was a favorite way in which to use my free time. Paris is a city that somehow fills with its presence. I took to walking for entire afternoons, to the Trocadero and then east along the Seine, crossing over into the 7^th on the Pont de L’Alma, or into the 6^th on the Pont des Arts if I’d planned to visit my favorite bookshop in Saint Germain.  That Christmas I walked by the eerily silent Grands Boulevards to pay a visit to the ornate Galleries Lafayette window displays that were, that year, as usual, pure magic.  I looped around to head west, walking through the boarded-up stalls of a Christmas market that had closed for the season after a month’s hard work serving up vin chaud and three-cheese raclette. I returned to my apartment, outside of which a neighbor had placed a small pine covered in white spray paint.

My London Christmases evoke a special festive feeling. The US holiday season kicks off the day after Halloween, but in the mother country, Oxford Street’s Christmas lights are the starting line. The lights go up eventfully. Everyone is excited! The Oxford Street lights are indeed a spectacle, with a waterfall of white incandescent droplets falling from the façades of buildings on the north and south sides of the street. In between, the sky above takes on a festive glow, with brightly lit lanterns hovering daintily over the double-decker buses that move imposingly through the city. The highlight, I always found, was spotting the occasional luminous jar of levitating Marmite, as if it were a slight of hand, a discrete reminder of the scene’s delightful Britishness.

After my first London Christmas I understood that once the Oxford Street lights go up, it is decidedly time to hit the pub, repeatedly until the new calendar year. I am in awe of how the English seem to fully and genuinely rejoice in the season’s designated festivities with all sorts of varied social groups and subsections thereof. There is holiday tea with the neighbors, a yuletide singles’ night out, the couples’ Christmas dinner and then various permutations of the obligatory office party. There was the Legal Team Christmas Pub Quiz, which tended to get surprisingly competitive, followed by a floor-wide holiday party the next evening that included all of Floor 31 in its diversity, making it inevitably more fun than the previous night out with lawyers alone. The Floor 31 secretaries had a tradition of sharing a block of hotel rooms near the venue, allowing them to party like it was 1999. The rest of us did our best to keep up, after which I’d exhausted my capacity to party. Still, we were expected to be enthusiastic the following week at client Christmas drinks, for which we were all well-dressed and well-behaved. By January, I could no longer stomach Sauvignon Blanc and was completely repulsed by the smell of finger sausage. Also, it was difficult to fit into my pants, or sorry – trousers. Pants and trousers, actually. This first Christmas helped explain the popular London phenomenon of “January Dryathlon.”

On a recent vacation, Pete and I found ourselves at the Auckland International Airport at 2 AM on December 25. We woke up at noon that day in our hotel, off to a late start but ready to seize the day and see Auckland! The city’s streets were deserted other than a few stray dogs, which made for a fascinating perspective on a new place. We discovered that McDonald’s and an Irish Pub specializing in Belgian-style mussels were our only real food choices, because we didn’t want to count the vending machine in the hotel lobby. We opted for Irish, with the live music being the decisive factor for Pete. I was convinced in full by the thought of Christmas lunch at an Irish-Belgian pub in New Zealand, which was clearly a once in a lifetime chance. We ordered hummus, which I didn’t think was Irish or Belgian, and of course the moules frites. There was a movie theater up the road, where we spent the remainder of the afternoon watching the first installation of the Star Wars prequels.

A few days ago while waiting in line, I thought to that Star Wars Christmas afternoon, just the two of us, in the absence of gifts, in Auckland. We were back home, buying tickets to a screening of the second Star Wars prequel at our favorite cinema on New Year’s Day. As we killed time in line we searched our smartphones excitedly for a nearby Irish Pub – let’s go after the movie! The first of the year found all Irish Pubs in the area closed, but we did try in earnest in honor of that unexpected, joyful Christmas day. Scenes from the Auckland Christmas came to me, and more strongly yet, the sensation from that day returned. My mind again began to wander to memories of Christmases past, and I saw that 2017 held new ones to take with me.