What was going on when I was born?

THE holiday season calls for a little glitter and glamour in dress, home decorating, entertaining and cooking. Indeed, the spirit of the season may inspire home cooks to attempt a festive dish that they have been meaning to make but have rarely had the opportunity or courage to confront. Such show-stoppers, though, need not be so laborious that they anchor the cook to the kitchen for hours. Nor must they be so risky as to find a host or hostess frantically calling a local Chinese carryout shop as the guests begin to arrive. Consider the centerpiece dishes described below: roast suckling pig with a sage-flavored apple stuffing, crown roast of pork stuffed with a spicy rice and sausage combination, and butterflied loin of lamb rolled around a mixture of spinach, pine nuts and mushrooms. The butcher can do the hard work: The pig can be ordered cleaned and ready for roasting; ask for the loin of lamb deboned and butterflied; the crown roast can be purchased already assembled. Only the creative part is left up to you - the stuffings, garnishes and side dishes.

International Secretary of State George P. Shultz reacted angrily on the issue of terrorism during a visit to Belgrade after the Yugoslav Foreign Minister had commented about the October hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in which an American was killed. Foreign Minister Raid Dizdarevic had said at a news conference that, although Yugoslavia condemned terrorism, ''one must also view the causes that lead to it.'' Mr. Shultz pounded the table and said, ''There must be no place to hide for people who do that kind of thing.'' [Page A1, Column 3.] The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko again took the mantle of rebel and critic to demand that the candor and openness of which Mikhail S. Gorbachev has spoken be applied to Russian literature. At a congress of Russian writers in Moscow he called for the lifting of some of the most sensitive taboos of Soviet culture. [A1:1.]

Latin America's leading debtor nations today proposed a set of ''emergency measures,'' including new loans and the reduction of interest rates, to permit a resumption of economic growth in the region. At the same time, they warned that, without relief from current interest payments, they might be forced to limit the transfer of resources abroad in order to avert social and political instability. The decisions came at the end of a two-day conference of foreign and finance ministers of the 11-nation Cartagena Group, called together to prepare a response to a recent United States debt initiative known as the Baker Plan.

Just five years ago, Francisco Villagran Kramer resigned his post as Vice President of Guatemala and fled the country. ''Death or exile is the fate of those who fight for justice in Guatemala,'' he said at the time. Today, Mr. Villagran's apartment in the capital is a gathering place for young activists eager to discuss what the future holds for Guatemalan democracy. He himself is said to be a possible candidate to head the Supreme Court. The military has run Guatemala for more than 30 years, and during that period Guatemalans have suffered some of the harshest repression in Latin America. Tens of thousands of people, many of them Indians descended from Mayan tribes, have died violently. During some periods, street-corner killings of students, businessmen, political organizers, university professors and trade unionists were common.

A Washington dispatch in some copies yesterday about changes in flight arrival and departure time slots listed the four affected airports incorrectly. National Airport in Washington is one of them; Newark International Airport is not.

President Reagan's draft budget for the fiscal year 1987 would reduce the staff of the Social Security Administration, abolish the Interstate Commerce Commission and end Federal support for the agricultural Extension Service. The commerce commission, established in 1887, is the oldest Federal regulatory agency. The Extension Service gives technical and scientific advice to farmers across the country. Administration officials, giving details of these proposals today in interviews, said they were part of a package of $50 billion in spending cuts and fee increases needed to hold the 1987 deficit to $144 billion, the maximum allowed by a new law. The law is designed to balance the budget by 1991.

The state that pioneered the open primary, income taxes and unemployment compensation has now devised a novel approach for addressing teen-age pregnancy. A wide-ranging law adopted unanimously by the State Legislature last month provides for sex education in public schools, grants for programs to counsel teen-agers, abortions without the necessity of parental consent and the establishment of a state adoption center. But what has caught the attention of most Wisconsin parents and teen-agers is a section known as the ''grandparents liability law.'' Under this law, parents of teen-agers who have babies are now legally obligated to provide financial support for those babies ''so far as the parent is able'' and the teen-ager is not. The obligation would continue until the teen-ager turns 18 years old, marries or joins the military. This portion of the Abortion Prevention and Family Responsibility Act of 1985 is being hailed and damned in equal measure, and all before it has actually been implemented in any concrete way.

Two concrete contractors testified yesterday that they had been forced to pay thousands of dollars in return for labor peace to Ralph Scopo, who retired last April after seven years as president of the Cement & Concrete Workers District Council of the Laborers International Union. The contractors, both of whom have pleaded guilty to making illegal payments to a union official, appeared in Federal District Court in Manhattan at the racketeering trial of Carmine Persico and nine other reputed leaders of the Colombo crime family. The jobs on which the witnesses said they had kicked back 1 percent of the contract cost to Mr. Scopo often were publicly financed projects. Among them were a library in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, a swimming pool in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, a Police Department station house in Washington Heights and additions to the city jail on Rikers Island.

A senior Air Force general said today that the Department of Defense was ''not technically responsible'' for the chartering, safety or operation of the Arrow Air plane in which 248 American soldiers died in a crash last week. In addition, the general said the Defense Department would have no role in investigating the cause of the crash at Gander, Newfoundland, because the Pentagon viewed such investigations as the responsibility of the Canadian Government and Federal Aviation Administration. The soldiers were returning from duty with the international peacekeeping force in the Sinai Desert when the plane crashed. A White House spokesman, Edward J. Djerejian, said the general was ''basically correct.'' Mr. Djerejian added: ''This doesn't mean that the Defense Department isn't assuming responsibility for following up on this matter. It is concerned about this tragedy and following the investigation of the causes of this crash by the F.A.A. and the Government of Canada very closely.''

An article in Business Day on Monday about Wall Street bonuses incorrectly described a change in salary policy several years ago at Merrill Lynch. Although salaried employees no longer receive year-end bonuses, their annual raises are larger than before.

The session was a closed one, but even so the poet's strong words against distortion of history, against censorship, self-flattery, silence and privilege in the world of letters were strikingly bold. When the poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, finished, the congress of Russian writers burst into prolonged applause. Now 52 years old and an honored member of the literary establishment, Mr. Yevtushenko had again taken the mantle of rebel and critic to demand that the candor and openness Mikhail S. Gorbachev has so often discussed be applied to Soviet literature. ''Today's long-awaited striving for change for the better in our country gives us profound hopes that self-flattery will be forever rejected, and that nonconcealment will become the norm of civic behavior,'' he said. ''We, men of letters, will not be worth a penny if we simply report and laud the social transformations taking place independently of us.''

''Today's long-awaited striving for change to the better in our country gives us profound hopes that self-flattery will be forever rejected, and that non-concealment will become the norm of civic behavior.