by Mónica Hutchens Tipton
Once upon a time, back in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, before many of you were born and before the rest of us became responsible, wise, and competent members of the sinister world of adulthood, there was an amazing ritual that filled us with joy, excitement, and material for dozens of stories. It involved weeks of anticipation, days of preparation, many pounds of sugar and butter and cups of flour, yards of wrapping paper and ribbon, and hours of journeying. It was an annual pilgrimage of the faithful and devoted and the obligated and reluctant. It was called simply, “Christmas at Nana’s.” My grandfather, while very much a part of our lives, was not included in the title of the event, perhaps because he spent so many, many hours at his barber shop nearby cutting the hair of the men he had known for decades.
In third week of December, our mother pulled out the cookie press and the cardamom, dug the small bottles of green and red sugar crystals and the tiny multi-color confections we knew only as “sprinkles” from the of the back of the upper cabinets. It seemed that the oven was preheated on Monday and continued to disgorge tray after tray of sprut bakkels, chocolate chip, sugar cutouts, and even the occasional gingerbread boy until the day of our departure: Christmas Eve after Dad got home from work. Her Sunbeam mixer orbited the bowls of dough hundreds of times more than that satellite, Sputnik, which had captured our attention, as well as my developing concern, during the October after my brother was born. The house was warm and fragrant with the aromas of butter, sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, and chocolate, and getting a chance to lick the beater of the mixer was a treat. No worries of diabetes or obesity in this house of young parents, only the chance to show how adult they had become, how responsible, how competent.
The late afternoon of Christmas Eve Day, bathed by 5PM, donned we now our Christmas jammies and began packing into the station wagon for our four hour, if there was no traffic on the Coast Highway, journey. Dad got home, changed from his work khakis and boots, showered, and off we went, snuggled in with pillows and blankets on a mattress over the flattened back seat of the station wagon. No worry of car seats or seat belts then, just the fun of watching the lights and the stars and the moon and the suspected flash of Rudolph’s nose as we lay outstretched in our private compartment. Gifts of all sizes and shapes, wrapped with Mom’s artistic flair, were strategically hidden under blankets around us, and a dozen boxes of that storage miracle, Tupperware, held the hundreds of cookies she had so diligently and lovingly prepared.
We would wind up the two-lane road from our home to the coastal crossroads that would lead us north to Los Angeles. The actual transition took place near a lagoon filled with waterfowl, and even the occasional flamingo, and was forever known to us as “The Duck Turn.” Reaching The Duck Turn was the first of the many milestones that told us that we were nearing our personal equivalent of the North Pole, Nana’s House. The next milestone would be an old Safeway Market on the west side of the Pacific Coast Highway in San Clemente. A few years later we would move to that tiny beach town, and I would grow up, marry, become a mother, and live there for two decades. For now it signaled the end of the long, dark roadway along the edge of the continent that crossed Camp Pendleton and had become known as “Blood Alley.”
One of the problems of being a precocious child who learned to read at a very young age is that one absorbs information, processes that information, and forms conclusions about that information, but hasn’t necessarily been provided with all of the information or enough life experience to make those conclusions valid. This resulted in years of worrying about things that were unwarranted, but seemed worthy of agitated mental activity in my very young psyche. As mentioned before, Sputnik inspired concern in my five-year-old mind about the possibility of The Russians, the most evil people on Earth, being able to see us all and catch us at our most vulnerable, wiping out our country and making the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance illegal. By the time I was seven, the similarly unseen but vividly imagined horrors of Blood Alley kept me tense and alert for the seemingly endless crossing of that terrible terrain. Consequently, the sight of the lights of San Clemente and the quick glance through the distinctive glass front and wide-spanning roof of the Safeway meant indeed, a safe way had been achieved.
The next milestone was a cheerful one: the sight of the statue of Laguna Beach’s famous Greeter. Occasionally, if we left early enough, or sometimes on the way home, we would spot Eiler Larsen himself, with his beard, broad smile, and red coat, waving from a corner at Forest and the Coast Highway in that then-pristine town. Later on, in the late 1960’s, my friend Vicki and I prowled every corner of Laguna for years, loving its bohemian atmosphere and its promise of adventure with hippies and surfers and great bookstores. For now, from the back of the station wagon, The Greeter meant we were halfway there!
Another long stretch took us through small beach towns, and somewhere just south of Huntington Beach, I would shut my eyes. The cue to do so came through the dark, through the air as the smell of oil. The pumps that bobbed rhythmically up and down, acres of them, for several miles on that city-crowded road, terrified me. Mom and Dad tried to tell us they were rocking horses, but no horse ever smelled like that, nor looked like that, nor made the landscape mechanical and desolate, and bleak. It wasn’t the smell of gasoline, which I loved, or the smell of car exhaust, which made me cough, but something else that reminded me of the tar trucks that would occasionally appear to repair a road or a roof, disgusting but apparently essential. It would be wonderful to declare myself prescient on that topic, but I would be stretching the truth. The truth, as I knew it then was that the oil fields destroyed the magic of the trip and were something to be endured, so that we could have the rich reward of Christmas at Nana’s. It was our version of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
That distance of roadway would finally end, and we would enter the big brightly lit tunnel that I was told went under the runways at The Airport. The Airport was intriguing as it implied rich people who dressed nicely, wearing suits and hats and high-heels and gloves, traveling very differently from us. I always assumed that they liked wearing gloves and hats; I didn’t find out later, when I had to wear suits and high heels, that jammies are the much preferable apparel for such extended travels. The Airport remained a mystery until I was twenty-one years old and took my first flight.
We would arrive in Santa Monica sometime after nine o’clock. One year when there was particularly bad traffic, probably due to some horrendous wreck on Blood Alley, we didn’t arrive until nearly MIDNIGHT! My much younger siblings slept much of the way, but my mind kept me alert, certain as I was that my attention was as crucial to our undamaged arrival as that of my dear daddy behind the steering wheel. The car stopped at the curb on Hill Street. Sleeping babies would be gently lifted from the mattress, toddlers rubbing their eyes and walking in plastic-footed pajamas across the lawn, up the step between the tree fern and the monstera, onto the porch, where, on the other side of the big window stood a glorious tree, topped with a star. We tumbled into the open arms of my grandmother. As tiny as she was, there was room for all five of us at once, it seemed. “Merry Christmas, mija! Look how big you are! Charlie, they’re here!” she would call in the voice that emphatically yet tenderly directed three daughters, three sons, and my headstrong grandfather for eight decades. My grandfather, coming in from the kitchen through the glass-paned door into the dining room, disappeared behind the biggest pile of Christmas presents I could imagine. This was no mean task, as my Papa was nearly as round as he was tall. This family trait is something all of us have fought, with varying degrees of success, for generations. Nonetheless, Papa outlived three of the doctors who told him, “Charlie, if you don’t lose weight, it’s going to kill you.” And, when he was ninety-five years old, their words came true.
The Nativity Scene was in its place on the mantel, the open Bible on the half-moon table near the bedroom door. Christmas was about Jesus in my grandparent’s home, a loving Jesus, a giving Jesus, and a caring Father Who Art In Heaven. My pretty aunty and all three of my handsome uncles, still in their teens, waited on the periphery, in order of eagerness to greet us. My young aunty held out her arms to take the baby, as late teenaged girls were wont to do. The twelve-year-old uncle and his friend barely looked up from their game of Monopoly, and the two uncles between said, “Hi,” then went to the kitchen. Cool members of the early Santa Monica surf culture didn’t have much use for seven-year old nieces. Later, one of those uncles taught me to ski, another to sing Native American songs, and the third, well, he brought some weed to my place in Ocean Beach in 1971.
I remember distinctly the music of the time: Mitch Miller’s Sing Along albums, The Chipmunks’ “Christmas, Christmas time is here…” There was Danny Kaye lisping through “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” and the song about underwear and the skates he didn’t get. The New Christy Minstrels and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Theresa Brewer singing about watching “Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and in the album that set my sense of humor and my love of satire, Stan Freberg’s “Green Chri$tma$” LP with that wonderful piece that is as true in the 21st century as it was in the mid-twentieth. To this day, I don’t think the oldest of the uncles knows how much he influenced my view on life. He is the one who gave me the copy of “The Prophet” that still sits on my bookshelf and played “Bah, Humbug Everybody. Good morning, Mr. Scrooge!” again and again so that I can remember it nearly fifty years later. If you haven’t heard it, you must Google it; however, that is a now and this story is a then.
Sometime near our arrival and once or twice simultaneously, my cousins would arrive, their parents carrying pies and one or both of the boys. My cousins’ journey was nearly identical to ours, but lacked the distinct comfort of the mattress. There were only two of them, however, and they were small enough to stretch across the back seat of the Bel Air sedan. They were received with the same warmth and devotion that had been showered on us. That wonderful uncle called me “Big Girl” even though I was the smallest in my class, and continued to do so even twelve years later when he and my aunt gave birth to their own daughter. There was an infinite amount of love to be shared in that house, especially at that time of year, and the following decades would prove it so again and again as the young aunty and uncles brought their children, and then we grew and arrived with the great-grandchildren.
Bedtime was an adventure of improvised sleeping arrangements. My parents and my cousins’ parents slept on the Hide-A-Bed in the living room, or on the double bed in the front bedroom. The uncles camped out on the floors of the living room and under the big dining room table. My great-grandfather lived in a basement room, and occasionally one or the other of the uncles would bunk with him. We little ones were tucked in two to a bunk in the middle bedroom, or later, as the crowd grew, moved to the bed and floor of my grandparents’ bedroom at the back of the house. I’m certain that the latter arrangement was best for Santa Claus, who somehow managed to deliver entire pedal cars, bicycles, slot car sets, huge Tonka trunks, dolls, and one year a pony, although it was only a photograph until we got home.
Some years there were strangers invited in to share the holidays by one or the other of the uncles, or by Nana or Papa. There was the struggling actor, the former girlfriend with no local family, the Army buddy, or perhaps the hopeful suitor of one of the beautiful or handsome ones. One year, a stranger stumbled in with ill intent. A burglar, hoping to collect all the holiday loot easily seen through the big window, sneaked into the darkened living room, only to fall over stacks of clean and folded diapers, tumbling on to the sleeping bag of one of the boys, and chased out by Dad and my older uncles. To the best of my knowledge, there were no other break-ins during the month of December ever again. There was, however, the wretched Christmas when everyone in the house had the flu; and another when my younger cousin had apparently been a naughty boy all year and Santa left him an empty stocking and no special gift. It rocked us to the core.
As the oldest, I had many responsibilities including speaking for my usually silent little sister, watching the younger ones, and writing the annual letter to Santa. When I was nearly ten, I was placed in charge of the bedroom full of cousins and second-cousins on Christmas Eve. I already knew that Santa needed the help of all the adults to prepare for the morning festivities, so I took my job seriously. As many toddlers as possible were tucked into the bed, the rest on the floors under blankets, and not a single one of them stayed where they had been placed after the parents shut the bedroom door. It didn’t help that someone in the living room jangled sleigh bells and shouted, “Ho-ho-ho” within minutes of the forced exile of the children. Eight excited children seemed to fill the room beyond capacity. Even my quiet sister chatted with her age-mate cousin, and my little brother was burbling, “Santa Cwaus is heuw!” It took me a long time to draw their attention away from the door and to the window, where we watched what appeared to be Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer taking long circles around the area. The fact that busy Cloverfield Airport was a few blocks away was extremely helpful to me that night. The kids grew tired of watching the red lights after about an hour, and soon tumbled into sleep. Years later, cleaning out the house after my grandparents had passed away, I found a stack of those letters to Santa from me and many of the cousins. It was true: Nana’s house was the North Pole.
My beautiful aunty became an artist and encased one of those letters in beautiful colored glass for me. It hangs year round in my home to remind me of days when love was unconditional and there were always, always cookies and presents, even when times were hard. The men went to work every day, the women cared for the house and the children, and the eventual dissatisfaction, which the brilliant and talented women of the family would feel was in the future. It would be a few years before the society began to spurn its value structure, taking my mother, my beautiful aunty, and my entire generation along for the ride.
It’s strange that I don’t remember much about the days leading up to our yearly Christmas adventure, only the nights. Maybe it is because, as every child knows, nighttime is magical while days are just full of routine. In years to come, the magic of night was replaced by other emotions that were the result of a new and different reality. Even during the good times, the early years, there was a certain sense of fragility to it all, like Mom’s delicate cookies. The scenes crumble at the edges as I hold them now, and when I bite into them, they become a sweet powder of sugar, butter, flour, and love. Then they are gone, leaving me wondering if they were really there, if there really was such security. I am grateful for the way my very young parents and my adored grandparents created such an oasis of contentment for us. I am proud to say that I have survived to this mid-point of my adulthood in part, no doubt, because of those few sojourns that occurred without fail, every December until 1963, when things began to crumble, ever so slightly, around the edges, not just in my world, but everywhere. But that is another story to be told at a different time, sometime in the future.
