OBTW: The geography of Christmas: It's not where but with whom

A few days ago, I came across a picture of my family taken on Christmas Day 1954. It's one of my favorite family photographs.

I was 8. My brother, Jim, was only 18 months old and my sister, Maureen, was 7. My parents, Joe and Lucille, were in their mid-30s.

Everyone is smiling and we look like a very typical American family on Christmas, full of good cheer and happiness.

My sister and I are dressed alike, in butter-yellow sweaters and Blackwatch plaid wool skirts. This was before we got tired of looking like twins, which we were not.

Brother Jim, with his curly hair and little-boy sweater is laughing.

My mother, in a blouse with a floppy bow and a dark skirt, is thinner than I remember. The black and white photo doesn't show her usual bright-red lipstick. My father is wearing his standard gray or black pants and a white collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

Brian isn't there -- he's 10 years in the future.

There is something special about that picture -- not for what's in it, but for what isn't.

Since it's a close-up, you can't see "the rest of the story." If you could draw the camera back maybe 10 feet and mentally leap backward 54 years, you would a see lot more.

You'd see, first of all, the other people who were there - Olivier Del Femine, Laurie Tuttle, Irv Schwartz, John Judy, Dick Mackin, the Bedenbaughs, the Wilkinsons and quite a few others whose names I no longer remember.

Glen and Nina Wilkinson, formerly of Texas, had three children, including a set of twins. The Bedenbaughs, Virginia natives, had two boys.

Del Femine, Tuttle, Schwartz, Judy and Mackin were young men, barely out of their teens. None of them were married. They were from Rhode Island, Iowa, New York, other states.

You'd see that, too, that this is not a just family picture at all, all least not in the traditional sense of family, because all the members of the "family" present that day were not related to each other by anything more than their acquaintance with my mother and father.

You'd see that we were not in a traditional American home in the suburbs.

Instead, we were in a spacious second-floor apartment with marble floors and 10-foot ceilings, with a balcony on one side and a large, sunny patio off the kitchen. A traditional Christmas tree is in the living room, and on the dining room table you'd see a traditional Christmas meal of turkey and ham and all the usual trimmings.

The tree and most of the food came from Weisbaden, Germany, via DC-3, the "Goony-bird," one of the many planes my father and the men who worked for him kept flying. The dishes on the table were a green and white willow pattern of Narumi china, given to my mother by those young servicemen, who enjoyed being a part of our extended family-away-from-home.

Pulling the camera back still further, you'd see that although it's a pleasantly warm day, dry and sunny, this scene is not set in Florida or Arizona or some sunny southern state.

Through the windows, you'd see donkeys and camels on the street, men and women going about their usual business, some dressed in American-style clothes, but most in traditional Arab dress. Palm trees are everywhere. It's Saturday, and it's not a holiday unless you're one of the many American, Italian or British families who lived in the African city of Tripoli, Libya.

The guests in our home that day were all American servicemen and their families -- our extended family for the two years or so we spent there.

And yet in every way but location, it was an entirely normal Christmas. We opened gifts and ate dinner. Maureen and I played Monopoly with my father and Dick Mackin and John Judy later in the evening while the women talked and some of the men traded war stories.

I remember that my sister and I tried to slip money under the table to my father, when he was losing the game. When he refused to take it, we tried to give it to him without him knowing about it, but somehow he always knew and always gave it back.

For all of us, it was the first Christmas we'd celebrated away from the places we called home. For my family and me it would be another 15 years before we made it "back home" for the holidays.

But here's an important thing to know -- it never felt like anything but Christmas, never felt like anything but home, no matter where we were.

Over all those years of traveling and celebrating Christmas in unfamiliar places, there were always new faces at the table. And each year, cards arrived from the ones who'd been there in past years. Laurie Tuttle called to talk to my father every year on Christmas Day.

Now that my parents are gone, I still receive Christmas cards from many of those "family" members, most of whom I haven't seen since I was a teenager or even younger. Only yesterday, a card arrived from Dick Mackin and his wife. That curly-haired boy of 20 I remember from 1954 is now in his 70s.

The green and white china now belongs to my daughter. It's a reminder of a different kind of family -- one as important to me as the people to whom I'm related by blood.

Because the spirit of Christmas has nothing to do with what far corner of the earth you live in or why you're there or whether you're related to whoever is present or not.

Because the spirit of Christmas has everything to do with friendship and love that spans decades and transcends family boundaries.

Merry Christmas to you and your family -- whoever they are and wherever you celebrate.