In watery Vancouver, Carol Ships serenade everyone with airs appropriate to the season, helping them forget that snow in that part of Canada rarely touches more than the mountaintops. In the Canadian middle and east, you see rosy cheeks, outdoor hockey games and sleds bearing Christmas trees. Rockwellian, eh?

A lot of information about Christmas customs around the world can be found on a Web site called Christmas.com, where folks from many lands have contributed articles.

Here in the United States, Christmas certainly has its charms, but all too often the holiday spirit is overwhelmed by commercial tie-ins. That may be why people travel at yuletide — not to escape Christmas but to find it, maybe in a different form or with a different emphasis and different values. Besides, even if the kids are acting up with sand pails and inner tubes, instead of snowballs, parents still can warn them, "You better watch out, you better not cry."

Santa can see the whole world with that magnifying glass of his.

Chicago Tribune travel writer Robert Cross spent most of one Christmas Day trying to solve a Rubik's Cube.

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Rio de Janeiro: On the Beach with Santa

By Laurie Goering

Philodendrons grow 30 feet high in steamy Rio de Janeiro, and poinsettias are trees instead of houseplants. But in the tropics, pine trees are a rarity. Still, if you really try, you can find a Christmas tree in Brazil's most beautiful city, where Christmas hits at the height of the summer swelter.

The vegetable vendor down the street knows you're looking and has put in a stock of 3-foot-tall cut shrubs that look remarkably like pines. But beware! Take one home and two days later it's deep brown and crumbling ornaments over the floor, even if you keep it well-watered.

The better choice is a good-sized houseplant, one with pine-like boughs. But you've got to keep the ornaments small and the lights to a minimum or you'll arrive home one day to find that your holiday cheer has overheated in the 100-degree swelter and drooped all over your holiday.

What's best is just to embrace Christmas, Brazilian-style. Put on a bikini for that photo with Santa, settled in his throne down at the local air-conditioned mall. Get used to Christmas carols about snow when the only white stuff anyone's ever seen is sprayed from a can on the local shop windows. And buy the right kind of Christmas tree for the tropics — an inflatable plastic model that sits perfectly on the sand at Ipanema Beach, where you're spending the holiday anyway, sipping a cold Antarctica beer.