Spending Christmas overseas away from family: Why being an Xmas 'orphan' is not all bad

I'll never forget our first orphan Christmas. My husband and I were renting a shabby eight-room apartment in the East Village with sloping wooden floors and marble fireplaces (in those days it cost a song, or a Christmas carol). We decided we had the space to host a Christmas lunch for our new friends.

Our plan to light a gaily-burning fire in the fireplace was stymied by a panicked landlord who spotted us carrying firewood up the four flights of stairs and told us he hadn't taken out insurance for fire.

But the apartment still looked beautiful. The markets sold garlands of real pine rather than the plastic versions we have in Australia, and the tree was a beautifully proportioned fir, not like the straggly treetops that are common here. We set up a long table, mostly of bits and pieces we'd found on the street, covered with thrift shop tablecloths (you'd call them "vintage" now).

There were about 10 of us, all adults from places that included Australia, Texas, New Jersey and Mexico. It was all going swimmingly well until I brought out puddings on a platter. I'd made several, hanging them in the darkroom in calico wraps to mature. We'd flamed them in the kitchen and they looked spectacular coming into the darkened room.

Except the Americans didn't know anything about the tradition of setting puddings alight and reacted by trying to douse the flames with their water glasses!

When I was living in France a few years later, we Aussie orphans gathered in Hautvillers, a small village in the Champagne region, in a rambling country house belonging to friends of friends, opposite the abbey where Dom Perignon pioneered wine-making techniques.

We shopped for goose and foie gras in the village market, spent a night and a day preparing the feast, and about a dozen of us sat at a long table, eating the slowest lunch in history, all washed down with buckets of inexpensive local champagne, which we bought from a winemaker who poured us samples in her kitchen, dressed in her nightgown. It snowed that year. The children went up to the attic and played with antique toys forgotten by past generations. It was magical.

In New York, later again, Christmasses became even more international, with a Jamaican family joining us, contributing collard greens and black-eyed peas to the standard Anglo fare of turkey and pudding. It was a culinary mishmash that didn't entirely work but the diversity was wonderful on a social level.

I don't come from a big family, so those large gatherings of friends are my strongest Christmas memories, beyond the years when my grandparents were alive. Sadly, like my grandparents, many of my extended family members overseas have left us now. Paul. Richard. Carol. Carolyn. Michael. Richie. But they're forever around those orphan Christmas tables for me.

If there's no place like home, make home where you are.

lee.tulloch@traveller.com.au