Home > Blog > Get Jolly! > Turkey Tales and Turkey Tails: An Island Christmas

Odd enough was the sight of a seven-foot-tall Santa, when the temperature was 90 degrees with humidity to match. That Santa was juddering and quaking as though the delirium tremens from a 30-day bender had finally kicked in made the scene that much more surreal. But when Santa started singing a Neal Sedaka song—I think it was “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”—I developed a crack in my mental foundation.

But that foundation had been foundering already, because I was on a tiny tropical island, many thousands of miles (and many states of consciousness) from my home in California. I’d signed on to teach English at the little community college on the Micronesian island of Kosrae, and though my girlfriend and I had been there several months, life on a small tropical island had remained anything but conventional. Add the Christmas element into that humid mix and there’s one more notice that registered my mailbox in the Twilight Zone.

But back to Santa: his larger-than-life self had appeared in the entryway of one of the island’s main stores early in the Christmas season, but at least it was December—Christmas catalogs and tinny canned music seem to be appearing in U.S. stores around August these days. Our island St. Nick had the usual tomato-red polyester garb, with polyester whiskers to match. His alarming trembling had something to do with the irregular rhythm of his motor, which like most metal things on the island, had probably started to rust ten minutes after he’d arrived. As for the rhythm of the music that came cascading from Santa’s head, that was strictly programmed from Wolfman Jack via American Graffiti —for whatever peculiar reason, Santa wasn’t into “Silent Night”—his stylings leaned much more to “Chantilly Lace” or some jumping ditty by the Shirelles.

But that Island Santa wasn’t quite right to me was actually quite right in the island scheme of things—I was the one out of my element here. The islanders seemed to regard Santa belting out doo-wop tunes with the same calm aplomb with which they seemed to do most everything: sweet and slow. Christmas yes, but Christmas with Micronesian flavors. And if those flavors included Hot and Spicy SPAM, so be it. The turkey you’d see on a U.S. table would probably be a turkey tail here.

Turkeys and mashed potatoes aren’t native island fare. A typical Kosraean table might have turkey tails on it, which are widely available. That’s right, the old Pope’s Nose, high fat and low nutritive content and all, not health food’s finest moment. The popularity of the tails is of a piece with SPAM’s ubiquity—an introduced health hazard, along with flowing rivers of cheap sugar drinks, another big hit here. America’s got it covered for spreading the wealth to far-flung isles.

Shopping at any time of the year on the island, much less Christmas, was always an adventure. There are small “cottage goods” stores everywhere, many in ramshackle buildings. They have a limited number of almost random-seeming wares: cabbage, salt, motor oil, batteries, cups. Residents go to one market for SPAM, the harbor for fish, another store for candy bars, passing through ragged towns and scattered shack/stores and by the few “regular” commercial enterprises, like Ace hardware. The many roadside stores usually don’t have parking lots, so cars pile haphazardly about. Of course, you can’t buy dog, the main meal at many a Kosraean table, at any of the stores; you have to grow your own or snatch one of the many raggedy-ass strays from their jungle lairs. But somehow the thought of a stuffed dog at the table, cranberry sauce or not, just didn’t whet the appetite.

Other than my psycho Santa, there were only a scattering of Christmas decorations about the island, and very few houses covered with lights, in classic American excess. The Christmas lights were all under the surface of the sea: any snorkel trip might find electric blue starfish, yellow spotted eel, orange puffer fish, tiny darts of light. Corals like ottomans, purple and green and blue. Fishes that are streaks of colored light, small (and large) darting miracles. Coral towers of knobs and knurls and squat barrels of crenulated purples and greens. They probably should have put a Santa down there too, the St. Nick of the Sea.

Even being from seasonless Central California, it was truly difficult to discern the calendar movements in Kosrae, where the temperature (hot) and humidity (lots) was nearly always the same, day and night. And that timeless island feeling—the space of the horizon, the scudding clouds, the sharp, slanting light, the hallucinatory azure brilliance of the sea, the hot nights under the spinning fan—didn’t lend itself to sensing whether it might be Easter or Fourth of July.

There were some Christmas elements that were native: the marching. Kosraeans young and old practice an almost military style of marching for a full month or so before Christmas, and then perform the marching ceremonies before packed houses in the local churches on Christmas day. They are divided into groups, usually by island municipality, and each group dresses in identical group colors. There’s a similarity to what the New Orleans Krewes do at Mardi Gras, though the islanders have some added oddness. Such as that the marchers carry bunches of candy that they throw into the spectator’s area. Along with other things they carry, like towels and umbrellas. Duck!

We did actually manage to get a turkey for Christmas dinner, along with some native dishes, like baby octopus. And plenty of pineapple juice and rum. We still had the 30-day drinking licenses for which we’d paid $4 when we’d arrived; we were told they were required to drink in the bars (of which there are few), but sadly, no one ever requested them. There was an island law on the books that said you could be arrested for having a drink on a Sunday, even in your own home, but I never heard anything about Christmas. (Just to be on the wrong side of the law, we always made sure to fix a stiff Sunday drink.)

One of the best parts of Christmas in Kosrae was that we received no Christmas catalogs, though we were having mail forwarded from the States. Well, check that: we did receive Christmas catalogs, but mostly the following March and April. Mail can be slow to the islands. Right now, Alice and I are staying on an island in the Bahamas. We probably won’t make Christmas, but we did have a nice Thanksgiving: Lobster quesadilla and ginger-infused margaritas. Who needs turkey?

Photo Credit: Tom Bentley