MORNING CALM TALES A Christmas story in Korea 1990

Festive and not-so-festive lights in downtown Seoul, published in The Korea Times Dec. 23, 1984. Korea Times Archive

By Jeffrey Miller

• Published Dec 24, 2025 6:20 AM KST

I arrived in Korea in 1990, just two weeks shy of Christmas. When my recruiter called in early October to offer me a teaching position at ELS (YBM Sisa) starting in December, she framed the offer as if she were handing me a gift with a tiny catch: Yes, you’ll be far from home for the holidays … but you probably won’t feel homesick.

Having spent several Christmases away during my military days, I wasn’t worried. I figured homesickness was like the flu — inevitable now and then, but survivable.

What I didn’t expect was that my first Christmas in Korea would become one of the best Christmases of my life.

Back in 1990, celebrating Christmas in Seoul was an entirely different experience from the Seoul of December today. There were no Daiso stores displaying shelves of ornaments, no Costco warehouses selling Christmas trees the size of small redwoods, no Starbucks cafes piping out carols as early as November and certainly no holiday plazas, winter festivals or synchronized light shows blanketing the city the way they do now. Hotels didn’t advertise Christmas buffets the size of Olympic training spreads.

But we did have Christmas cards. And plenty of them.

Stationery stores displayed revolving racks of cards that you could spin like roulette wheels. These weren’t quite the Currier and Ives Hallmark scenes I remembered: no frozen ponds with bonnet-wearing ladies, no red barns dusted with nostalgia. Instead, Korea gave Christmas its own twist. Some cards featured Santa and his reindeer looking cheerfully out of place. Others showed children playing traditional Korean games. Many weren’t even Christmas cards at all, but general season’s greetings or New Year’s cards, adorned with cranes, mountains, pine trees and stylized calligraphy. The snowy palace scenes — some in soft color, others stark black and white — became my favorites, winter postcards from a Seoul I was still discovering.

One afternoon just before Christmas, I bought a stack of cards and settled into a quiet coffeehouse near work. I spent the afternoon writing messages to family and friends as Bing Crosby crooned "White Christmas" over the sound system. Outside, cars slithered through the cold, and inside I felt wrapped in a strange, lovely combination of solitude and belonging.

Christmas Eve that year fell on a Monday. One of our teachers — an Army veteran with connections to one of the U.S. Army bases in Seoul — somehow arranged for a full Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, paid for by the school. The break room transformed into a holiday banquet: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberries, pie. It wasn’t quite the same as home, but it was close enough to melt whatever nostalgia remained. For the rest of the afternoon, we grazed on leftovers, drifting in and out of the room, plates in hand, spirits lifted.

That evening, several classes combined for a Christmas carol session. Someone photocopied lyrics. Someone else brought a guitar. And for one sweet, unpolished hour, our language institute filled with the voices of students and teachers singing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Deck the Halls” and that perennial holiday and noraebang favorite, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

My recruiter had been right: I was too caught up in the joy of it all to feel even a hint of homesickness.

That quiet little Christmas of 1990 turned out to be a snapshot in time, because Korea was already on the brink of reinventing the holiday.

We still had our Christmas cards. Kyobo's aisles were filled with shoppers flipping through racks of cards — UNICEF cards by children around the world, elegant lacquer-style cards and the traditional Korean ones I had fallen in love with my first winter here. Then email and e-cards arrived, and the racks began to thin. Today, you have to really search to find a good card at all.

But Seoul itself had transformed. Myeong-dong merchants, along with Lotte and Shinsegae Department Stores, began embracing Christmas with lights, decorations, trees and elaborate displays. What had once been a quiet nod to a Western holiday steadily grew into a full-fledged festival. Today, Seoul Plaza hosts a towering Christmas tree each December, glowing above the ice rink and crowds. The city sparkles for weeks.

Even Cheonggye Stream — once covered by concrete and traffic — now becomes a miles-long river of lights, drawing families, couples and tourists who wander beneath glowing arches and illuminated sculptures. It’s hard to imagine that this bustling winter walkway was an elevated roadway when I arrived in 1990.

I won’t deny the beauty of it, but I confess I miss the quiet simplicity of 1990, when Christmas felt like something discovered rather than delivered, like stumbling upon a small flame in a foreign land and realizing unexpectedly that it warms you.

I remember one night in 1995, riding home to my Yeonhui-dong apartment from the Apgujeong area. As the taxi headed toward Olympic Expressway, I looked up at the apartment towers — dark monoliths against the winter sky — and noticed several windows lit with tiny, twinkling Christmas trees in a reminder that the holiday was quietly, steadily growing roots here.

I’ve lived in Korea long enough now to watch Christmas evolve the way everything in this country evolves — quickly, confidently and with a flair for spectacle. The holiday of bustling markets, synchronized light displays and towering trees is a far cry from the quieter, humbler Christmas of 1990, when a few racks of cards, a single afternoon in a coffee shop and a holiday dinner in our teachers’ break room were enough to make the season feel complete.

But to me, both versions hold something precious.

The old one reminds me of who I was. The new one reminds me of who I’ve become.

And every year, when December arrives, I feel both stories pulling me in — one from the past, one from the present — each offering its own kind of comfort in the Land of Morning Calm.

What I didn’t realize in 1990 was that I wasn’t just celebrating a holiday in a foreign country — I was planting the first roots of a life. Back then, Christmas was a bridge connecting the place I had come from to the place I was learning to call home. Today, it is a reminder of the journey itself: the early days of discovery, the people who welcomed me, the classrooms filled with eager faces, the small kindnesses that stitched my life together here.

Korea taught me that Christmas doesn’t need familiar decorations or the rituals I grew up with to feel meaningful. Sometimes all it takes is a warm cup of coffee on a cold afternoon, a stack of cards waiting to be written or the sound of voices — any voices — singing carols in imperfect harmony.

These are the things I carry with me now: not the lights, not the spectacle, but the moments of quiet joy that found me when I least expected them.

In the end, Christmas hasn’t changed nearly as much as I have. And maybe that’s the real gift — the one I never saw coming when I arrived here all those years ago, stepping into a Korean winter that would, in time, become the backdrop of my life.

Jeffrey Miller is the author of several novels, including "War Remains," a story about the early days of the Korean War, and "No Way Out," a thriller set in Seoul in 1990.