But my brother in law, Teui, who was a local director of education, knew a bit more than most about Western traditions. He knew that many in the West ate turkey to mark the day. As luck would have it, at that time many people in the area were raising turkeys, so he bought one.
I got the local kids twisting colourful streamers from crepe and cutting coloured art paper into strips and pasting them with flour paste to make chains. The place began to look more like Christmas. Christmas tree and lights? No. Too hard.
The turkey, meanwhile, lay for hours in the yard of the house, its feet bound, complaining occasionally. My wife Pen and I were on the verge of freeing it but Teui beat us to it, despatching the bird and setting about plucking it. It was a fine specimen, large and plump.
There was no oven in the house, So the turkey was steamed. Hmm.
Meanwhile, Teui’s wife Noi was stir-frying the starter for our feast: silkworm pupae.
Silkworms munch their way through mulberry leaves for about three weeks before weaving silk around themselves while they transform themselves into pupae.
At this point they are harvested. They are boiled, which of course kills the pupae but makes the silk easier to remove. The boiled pupae are sold in the market as food.
Fried up, they look a little like tiny brown tennis shoes, filled with something very like egg yolk, but with a slightly prawn-like flavour. Served up with salt and chili powder they are – well – edible. But not very Christmassy.
The turkey was served, but steamed is not roasted, and the bird turned out to be pretty tough. And stir-fried vegetables are not roast potatoes, bread sauce, gravy and stuffing. Good try but not an unqualified success. The Thais agreed. They pronounced the turkey to be rather dull.
No Christmas pudding, either, but sticky rice with durian is something I love, so dessert cheered me up.
But the highlight of the entire meal, of the whole day, was three bottles of champagne. In fact it was not technically champagne because it came from the Soviet Union. Pen had picked it up from a nearby market.
This was not just any market. At that time the Vietnamese occupied most of Cambodia, which borders on Srisaket, and were intent on driving the genocidal Khmer Rouge into extinction.
The KR fighters had been pushed into the forests bordering Srisaket.
While the KR battled on, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled across the border into huge camps nominally run by Thailand and the UN but managed inside by the KR or other groups fighting the Vietnamese.
The one nearest to where we spent Christmas was run by the KR, and had a market once a week, into which Thais (but no other nationalities) were allowed. It was full of forest meat, mostly dried deer, along with what had once been treasured possessions such as genuine Rolex watches plundered by the KR from people they had killed.
It sounded like a very sad place and I was rather glad I was not allowed in. But the champagne, now that was a mystery. How had a sparkling wine grown and bottled in the Soviet Union ended up in a Khmer Rouge camp on the border of Thailand?
I later did some research (bear in mind that this was long before Google) and came across a curious story.
The Tsars of Russia, the story went, were great lovers of Champagne and imported oceans of it from France at great expense. A decision was made to reduce that cost by creating a Russian version, and Russian spies were sent out to “borrow” some vines from the Champagne region.
Research showed that the area with the soil, terrain and climate most like that of the Champagne region was near the Black Sea, and it was there that the Russian empire started making its own champagne.
That still didn’t explain how the Russian bubbly got into a KR market. I have a theory, though. It goes like this: The Vietnamese were getting “technical” help in their drive against the KR from the USSR. One form of this help was Russian pilots.
Warplane jockeys are, as everyone knows, great ones for champagne. So the Russians were probably (I argued to myself) getting supplies of the good stuff in their mess in Cambodia.
Imagine some cases “falling off the back of a truck”, and being carried on people’s heads across the war-torn country. Weirder things happened in Cambodia in those days.
And their reward at the end of the champagne trail? A dollar a bottle.Of course, my theory may be absolute nonsense. Probably is.But the Russian champagne was real enough, and was a cheerfully seasonal way to wash down the steamed turkey and silkworm cocoons.