An unexpected childhood detour through Sweden.

It was December 1976 and my mother had taken us to Sweden, her native country, for Christmas. We were packed to stay for two weeks, but a few days after we got there, the plan changed radically. My mother?who was up against Roy Cohn as a divorce attorney back in New York?called us into our hotel room and announced that we were simply not going home. We were staying in Sweden until my sister and I were both 18, which in my case meant eight years. We'd ship three of our five cats over, but not my hamster, my fish or any of our possessions.

I sat on the edge of the hotel bed, speechless, while my older sister wailed and screamed like she was having a limb amputated. She had a ticket the following week to an Aerosmith concert at Madison Square Garden, so the news was particularly devastating to her. She ran around the room in circles screaming, like somebody who had caught fire, and I remember trying to offer her pieces of rubbery Swedish candy as consolation.

I had been growing increasingly concerned about the candy, myself, because the colors were all dull?deliberately so, it seemed. My mother explained that in Sweden they had strict laws about food coloring. This was a portent of things to come; we were now in the land of Lutheran moderation, subtlety and seemliness. And it was close to Christmas.

Not quite old enough to grasp the reality that we were exiled?that we actually weren't going home to New York and wouldn't set foot there for almost a decade?I focused my child's mind on what I considered to be the critical details. The little town of Orebro with its medieval castle in the middle was quaint enough, but the Christmas decor was frustrating, and I was a maniac about Christmas. For one thing, the lights were all white. The ornaments were made of straw or hay. And there didn't appear to be any Santa Claus. Instead there were dozens of little laconic gnomes with pointy red hats.

I started to panic. My sister, Bibi, was too furious to speak. My mother, for her part, was understandably stressed out, going out in the snow every day to various state agencies to try to secure housing for us and get a job, and all I could think about was how to find colored Christmas lights.

"Mom, why don't they have colored lights?" I asked over and over.

"Because they don't," she said. "They use white lights here?they think it's more tasteful."

"But Mom, isn't there a single store that sells colored lights?"

We didn't even have an apartment yet, much less a Christmas tree.

"I don't think so. But we'll look, ok?"

There was a big department store called Domus, the "People's" department store. Domus had supermarkets too, where every single product was generic: white with blue labels, and the name of the item in plain white letters. This was one of the many manifestations of the ruling Social Democratic Party, as the profits from the stores were supposed to be returned and dispensed among "the people." I never understood how that worked and still don't.

I made my mother inquire about colored lights at Domus as well as the two other department stores in the city center. Each time the answer came back, and rather piously: No, they did not sell those. I eventually bought some colored markers and tried to color the white lights myself, but it didn't work and I started crying.

My sister, meanwhile, was inconsolable for her own reasons. Her record collection, for one thing, would never be seen again. My mother said we could buy a single album if we could agree on one. She left us in the record department at Domus and came back half an hour later when we'd made our choice: Kiss, Destroyer. It was 32 kronor, which was about $8 then (about $3 now).

For the first week, we stayed out in the country, in the home of a friend of my mother's who'd agreed to take us in until we got settled. Bibi played the Kiss record non-stop, and I searched the radio for recognizable Christmas songs. Every tune was set to the same feverish polka beat, and my mother explained that we were meant to dance around the tree holding hands.

"No way," my sister hissed. "I'm not doing that."

"Me neither," I said.

I made my mother translate the song lyrics, and one was more baffling than the next. No mention of Jesus, the manger, chestnuts, Frosty, Rudolph?nothing. The chorus to the most popular song translated verbatim into this: "You think you're pretty but I don't think so. You think you're pretty but I don't think so."

My mother described this as a very Swedish attitude; nobody was supposed to think they were prettier or better than anybody else. Another song was about a fox crossing an ice pond, and another was about frogs.

"This place sucks!" my sister wailed. "I want to go home."

She locked herself in the bathroom and cried for hours on end. I went out occasionally and made snow angels in the backyard. At least I wasn't dealing with the impending doom of puberty, as my sister was.

We got an apartment pretty quickly, in a housing complex on the outskirts of town filled with generic red-brick three-story buildings that were impressive until we were told they'd been built to accommodate what the Swedes called "blackheads." This meant people with dark hair. Immigrants. The complex was austere and modern, part of an immense social-engineering program launched by the Social Democrats in the mid-60s called The Million Program, which aimed to build one million apartments such as these, so every single person could have heat, running water and even identical kitchens that included cutting boards that slid out from under the counter, and other clever, pragmatic, socially engineered details.

In addition to the immigrant population, which Sweden had absorbed en masse in the 60s, the rest of the people who lived in these soulless units were solid working-class Swedish families, with little ruffled curtains in the windows, identical Advent stars and electric Advent candelabras I originally mistook for menorahs. The Swedes take their "Jul" very seriously?and by 1976, it had become a strictly ritualized hybrid of the old world and the new. I learned that they all ate their traditional meal of ham, potatos and spongy soaked fish called "lutfisk" at exactly noon on Dec. 24. Then everyone, and I mean every single citizen, sat down at 4 p.m. to watch a medley of old classic Disney cartoons, most importantly Donald Duck, whom they called "Kalle Anka." They were wildly anti-American, but Donald Duck was essential to their Christmas ritual for reasons I'll never fathom.

"Can we call Dad?" I asked my mother.

Generally we called him only in tightly scripted and highly coordinated fits of animosity, usually about money, but a few times in the eight years we lived there, we called him because we needed other kinds of help. He really tried to help us however he could, and it was a strange fluke that Roy Cohn had been his lawyer during the divorce. My father is the kind of person who won't get up if the cat is sleeping on his lap. He'll wait until the cat wakes up.

"I want him to send us some colored lights, and maybe we can find a converter cable," I said. "I also want him to send some garlands." I wanted the thick, tacky stuff, from Woolworths on 79th St.

We eventually settled into our apartment, with furniture the state had kindly provided, on loan from a hospital waiting room that was being renovated. My mother announced that she was going to go to work, and that meant one of us was in charge of cooking and the other in charge of cleaning. I shot my hand up and said: "I'll cook."

I still spoke no Swedish and couldn't read the recipes I'd clipped from magazines, but I went dutifully to the People's supermarket and bought ingredients for our highly improvised meals. The first thing I bought was a big bottle of soy sauce?figuring I'd douse the meals with that until I learned how to cook.

Meanwhile, my father sent a box of the tackiest Christmas decorations known to man?thick, bushy electric-pink and -blue garlands from Woolworths, along with flashing colored lights.

Now we could fight back.

I twined the garlands all around the sleek wooden arms of the borrowed hospital furniture, and then all around the bleak walls and doorways. I sprayed our windows with Woolworths' bottled snow and wrote the words "Merry Christmas" in English, like a vandal. Our tree was a blinking, garland-laden, tacky monstrosity of everything Swedes hate about America, and my mother took great glee in seeing how upset they were when they saw it. The butter inSweden is actually called (loosely translated) "Everything in Moderation."

We started school eventually, and the children were awed by the fact that we were from New York, but constantly berated us about Vietnam and about what had been done to the Native Americans.

"What can we nail them on?" I asked my mother. "Didn't they do something bad to the Lapps?"

As the years passed, we became more and more Swedish, but we never relinquished our blinking tree and never cooked a ham at Christmas. We always cooked a turkey, no matter how skinny and hopeless it was.

My sister boarded a plane back to New York approximately seven minutes after she turned 18. She wrote me letters from New York with exciting news about her job in a record store in the Village, and advice about the transition back.

"People are different here," she warned. "Especially men. They will tell you things they do not mean. They'll tell you they're going to call you for instance, but they won't. It's like a double language."

"They won't call me?" I thought. "Why on Earth not?"

I told the whole town, with bursting pride, that Bibi had sold a record to Tom Verlaine. Everybody got a vicarious thrill.

When I turned 18, I lingered for a few months, slowly getting our apartment packed up, and trying to work up my mother's courage to return. By this time, I'd been speaking, reading and writing only in Swedish for eight years. My English was stuck at the level of a 10-year-old, and I spoke with a slight Swedish accent. And my friends?they were like my arms and legs. A few of them traveled all the way to Stockholm with me, all the way out to the airport to say goodbye, and we were all crying.

It's 20 years later now and I still miss them every day. I sometimes wish I could go back, but you can't go back.

The first Christmas after Mom died in 1999, we suddenly got a profound urge for a true Swedish Christmas, thinking it would bring her back in spirit a little bit. Too depressed to cook, we ordered ham from a Swedish restaurant. When it arrived, it was just a few meager slices, and we all went into a blind fury, cursing the Swedes. I had carefully displayed dozens of little straw and hay ornaments I'd bought at the Swedish Seamen's church on 48th St. and even placed a traditional Swedish straw goat under the tree. My father was quite good-natured about all this?being Jewish and watching his children on Christmas Eve screaming for ham. This may be what my friend Tamara is referring to when she tells me I'm "conflicted" about my Judaism.

I tell her it's kind of true, maybe, but I'm even more conflicted about my Swedishness. Each year on Dec. 13, I go to the Lutheran Church on 65th St. to see the Lucia procession and hear the lovely songs, and see the Lucia in her white gown, red sash and lingonberry shrub crown with candles on her head. Sometimes I wonder whether I am really remembering things right, but I swear we used to dress up in those white nightgowns and stand at the bedside of our school teacher at 6 a.m. singing and serving saffron buns with coffee.

And wouldn't you know, all these years later, when my sister and I are decorating the tree, we have the same conversation every year. We hold up the bushel of tangled lights and say: "White lights or colored?"

We always wind up choosing the white ones.

"It's more tasteful," my sister says.

"It really is."