Hawaiians are getting used to the swirl of change. Barack Obama’s Christmas return to the islands of his birth has brought unprecedented attention to America’s most exotic state, and has also inspired the invention of a new sundae at the Honolulu ice-cream shop where the president-elect worked as a teenager.

The swirl of change is a vanilla-based concoction laced with chocolate, caramel and nuts. It offers a useful symbol for the beguiling mix of tropical hedonism and cool political calculation that is rapidly turning into an early hallmark of Obama’s presidential style.

Obama’s return to the island of Oahu, where his family is renting a $9m (£6.1m) beach-front mansion for a 12-day break over Christmas and the new year, has conveniently removed him from an incendiary Illinois corruption scandal that has scarred Chicago, his adopted hometown.

Operating in a time zone five hours behind the evening news deadlines of New York and Washington DC, Obama is making the most of his comparative isolation. While US headlines were last week dominated by political scuffling over Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor, and his alleged attempts to sell Obama’s Senate seat, the biggest controversies over the Hawaii visit concerned paparazzi photographs of Obama’s muscular torso and the flawed mechanics of his golf swing.

Obama has insisted that he still considers Chicago his home and intends to return often after he moves into the White House next month. “My Kennebunkport is on the south side of Chicago,” he said, referring to the town on the Maine coast where President George Bush Sr established a holiday retreat.

Yet some of Obama’s friends and aides are wondering if Hawaii is on its way to hosting the westernmost summer – or winter – White House in the history of presidential holidays. Most presidents have tended, for both family and security reasons, to stick to familiar locations for their breaks from Washington politics, and there is even a precedent for choosing Hawaii – Franklin Roosevelt briefly ran the country during the second world war from an office in the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Honolulu.

Since then, Richard Nixon at San Clemente and Ronald Reagan at his Rancho del Cielo both spent long periods in California; Lyndon Johnson and George W Bush were devoted to their ranches in Texas.

Obama spent 14 of his first 18 years in Hawaii, and has written extensively about his love for the islands and the benefits he feels from returning there. Whenever he returned to Hawaii, said Charles Ogletree,a Harvard law professor and close family friend, “you could see the pressure released from his body”.

Even though Honolulu is 5,000 miles and a 10-hour flight from Washington, Obama found last week that there were distinct personal and political advantages to his secluded holiday compound at the end of the 2½mile beach at Kailua, about a 30-minute drive through the Koolau mountains from Honolulu. Easily secured by the secret service, the luxury property offers sweeping Pacific views and spacious marble interiors.

It is part of a compound of similar homes that have been occupied by Obama’s closest Chicago friends, among them Martin Nesbitt, a businessman and basketball partner, and Eric Whitaker, the doctor who delivered Michelle Obama’s daughters, Malia and Sasha. The party was due to be joined by Valerie Jarrett, another Chicago friend who will move to the White House as the new president’s senior adviser.

Obama would not be the first modern president to use rented accommodation as a presidential base – Bill and Hillary Clinton never owned a holiday home and often borrowed or rented houses.

Few details have emerged of the Obamas’ Christmas activities, but by most accounts the family likes to play dominoes and whist. A nearby US marine base has provided Obama with a gym and a basketball court for his regular exercise.

The only blots on the president-elect’s horizon have been long-distance paparazzi lenses – although there is some suspicion in Washington circles that the notorious shot of a topless Obama showing off his muscled chest was a carefully calculated stunt. The Obamas also stayed away from church over Christmas, ostensibly because they did not wish to “disrupt a church community . . . with the burdens that come with a presidential visit”, according to Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman.

Perhaps the surest measure of the holiday’s success was that the White House press corps accompanying the next president has been reduced to interviewing each other about how much surfing they have been doing.

“It has been a very news-free trip,” lamented John McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. That is exactly what Obama was hoping for, and is another reason why he may return often to Hawaii.

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