Letters to the Editor

Traditions are comforting, but sometimes you just have to improvise and make the best of things when spending holidays far from home.

While serving as civilians at a military base in Bavaria in 1996, my eventual wife and I spent a long November weekend in Budapest with two other American couples. We hadn’t met them before, but mutual friends suggested we all had much in common.

We boarded a train late Thanksgiving morning and began to get acquainted over a pre-packed spread of cold turkey, cranberry sauce, candied yams and pumpkin muffins just east of Linz.

The other passengers on the train we...