Christmas at the L.A. Mission

On Christmas Eve afternoon, Daniel and I volunteered at the Los Angeles Mission for their annual holiday dinner...

Although we are all very aware of the homeless conditions in Los Angeles, it is usually limited to seeing a person sleeping on the street here and there, or seeing the random person asking for change...

We were ushered to a booth outside, past the area where lunch was being served, where volunteers were dispensing black down jackets with an Aeropostale label inside.... Whether that company donated them or someone else did, I don't know... Daniel was charged with stamping each person's hand as they approached the booth - presumably to prevent people from returning to the line and claiming a second coat - and I was told to count the people in line...

This sounded simple at first... But as I took a minute to get my bearings, a fast and steady stream of people, many of whom were still eating their dinner of ham and roast turkey on paper plates, came striding out of the Mission building and into the queue... Since the people dispensing the jackets were not moving that quickly, the homeless people had to stop and stand in a line...



I stood on the other side of a fence, standing in front of an area where volunteers from JAAKS Pacific sorting large piles of toys that their company had donated, which were being given from another booth...

I looked at every face before me, or tried to, to ensure that my count was accurate... The common stereotype of the homeless is a white or African American male, over 40, and possibly a war veteran... There I saw women of all ages - some pushing baby strollers.. There were many children and teenagers, many more than I would have ever guessed and more than is comfortable to consider... And every ethnicity I could think of was represented, although there were many more darker faces...

The sun was in my face, but after a while, I took my sunglasses off... I didn't want to seem shielded from the people... It was bad enough that I had to stand behind a fence... I felt shy and awkward at first, being confronted first-hand with real poverty, not some version of it in a book or a movie...

Two things were most humbling... Looking at the faces that filed past me, I was struck with the fact that with basic health care, simple diet, and general grooming, they looked like the faces I live with, work with, and socialize with... I tried to keep that in mind and chatted with them, complimenting the women on some bauble they wore and shyly smiling and saying "Merry Christmas" to the men and children...

They were from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, ages, perhaps even educational levels... But there for all the world to see, they were reduced to a statistic, a blighted population that provided people like me - and others who are considered "more important" - with an opportunity to help out for one day so that we could feel good about ourselves and be able to tell how we put the "true spirit of Christmas" into practice...

The other thing was that the people kept saying, "Thank you" to me... They had probably done the same for the volunteers who fed them and gave their children toys...

Friends who have worked with the homeless tell me how good it feels to be thanked... I felt like I didn't deserve thanks, I who in a few hours, would be able to get out of the afternoon chill and make Christmas Eve dinner for my family... I preferred simply exchanging the more egalitarian "Merry Christmas," each of us just another human being swept up into the holiday vortex...

Rodney Luck, a volunteer who drove all the way down from the Sacramento area to help out on Christmas Eve, wrote me later that, "It is very gratifying that volunteers such as you and I can give and see another side of life that not everyone can share and understand."...

"Most of the people do not live in the streets but are poor struggling families and people looking for help," he said in an email after the event... I agreed with him in the sentiment that "Without help from the Mission and other agencies, these are people that would not have anything for the holidays."... But I also don't think it's all that simple...

Several people who were told that they could not take toys or a jacket to a child who was not present were angry... An African American woman was yelling at the JAKKS crew, saying that the Mexican kids had gotten all the best toys...

A lot of the kids wanted to exchange the toys they had received for something else that they saw on the piles behind me... The volunteers were not allowed to switch anything for them... Sadly, a couple of the JAKKS guys were downright surly after a while, grumbling under their breath after having had heated words with one of the people in line...

I wondered as a dozen kids filed past me loaded down with garishly packaged toys, where they would be able to fly the cheap kites they were given that day... I wondered who chose the gift assortment of "spa" toiletries for preteen girls who didn't even have their own bathtub...

Is misguided charity really charity?... And is charity that is regulated the way the Mission does at these events really truly giving?...

A woman in a wheelchair rolled up to me as the line for jackets had disappeared... She told me that "Pastor Smith" said there would be blankets and other items set aside for her... I referred her to another volunteer, who after scowling in puzzlement at me, pretty much ignored her... Ten minutes later, I heard her shouting her request out again to someone else in our enclosed area, referencing a pastor with a different name... This was met with equal indifference...

I understand that these are the mean streets... The Mission and other agencies have to dole out their resources carefully so that as many individuals can be served as possible... But what was one blanket and some food for one woman, who may have been mentally unstable but who was in front of us right at that moment, basically in need and begging?...

We stood like sentries among piles of cheap, gaudy toys and donated down jackets... I pictured these jackets being sported by recipients along the streets of Skid Row and after the holiday break, in the poorest schools of the LAUSD... Perhaps they would be exchanged on the streets for other more desirable quarry: food, liquor, drugs...

While I had been trying very hard not to miss anybody in my count, it became futile at times... I would eyeball a group with two or three adults and what looked like about four children... I'd blink and suddenly, two or three more would appear as if out of nowhere... At the end, I counted 1,530 adults and 1,065 children... The unexpectedly high ratio of children to adults was heartwrenching...

I realized that many of the families with children did not exactly live on the streets... Many were probably residing in shelters or transitional housing... Their clothes were clean, and they looked as if they had bathed recently...

I could not help but think of the contrast between this picture of childhood with that of my nephews' safe and comfortable world... After one of their typically busy schooldays or weekend rounds of tae kwon do, birthday parties, and other extracurricular activities, they literally beg to be taken home and won't allow their parents to stop on the way home for even a gallon of milk... Their house is the one that all their friends want to go to right after school... Even if there is a playdate at a friend's house or a park to allow my sister and brother-in-law some free time, the playmates want to come over to Seiji and Kenzo's house anyway...

The kids who were at the Mission that day at the Mission don't have a warm, safe house down the street from a school whose biggest financial crisis centers on which celebrity parent will grace the next fundraising event... They don't have spare rooms in which to keep every discarded toy they've ever owned in their entire seven or eight years of life... They can't complain that they only like blueberry yogurt and won't eat the strawberry variety that is the only kind their brother likes, forcing my sister to buy two different cases of Go-Gurt a week...

What my nephews have in common with the kids on the street are dreams... At Christmas, they all dream of what Santa will bring them... While most of Seiji and Kenzo's wish lists - whether they be material, educational, or developmental - may be answered more closely for the forseeable future, I hope that in the years to come, something will change for the children at the Mission...

I hope that those who are caring for them will not have to take them to the Mission for the charity of a Christmas dinner on the street and "gifts" of cheaply made toys and unattractive clothing that will brand them as beggars at school... I hope that someone will show these children how to take care of themselves - through education, through mentoring, and through letting them know that they too can someday earn the means to help those who live in the same need they came from...

I also hope that my nephews will learn someday that it is partly their responsibility to make life better for people whose circumstances and privilege do not equal theirs... I hope that one day they will learn to look at people in the street and see in their faces the same potential of the family they live with, the kids they go to school with, the friends they build their world with.

It's A Small World...

Love Hector Tobar's column today in the LA Times... At our three-day celebration - Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Kenzo's 6th birthday party, we have had empanadas, lasagna, an Italian recipe for paper-wrapped trout, smoked ham on biscuits, yakitori chicken with ume and shiso, mochi ice cream, and Filipino sweets like kusinta and ginataan...



Our family sets a pretty global table all year round and we all love to explore new dishes from many cuisines... But it is at Christmas and other holidays that you really see the various cultural influences that have shaped us in many ways and that we welcome with new friends and family members...

Warm Tummies, Warm Hearts

Artist Eunice Gearhart and her husband enjoy the enjoys traditional culinary traditions of the East Coast, as influenced by her French and Irish heritage and his Pennsylvania Dutch background.

"Raised on food that is both warm and memorable, food for me conjures up memories of comfort and family and plays an important part in our celebrations," she writes. "My family always celebrated with warm Apple Slump, a recipe that goes back to the early 1800s in New England. We used whatever was available in those days, usually apples, to make a kind of cake, pudding treat. This biscuit - brownie - pudding, dumpling kind of cake would 'slump' when it was baked, which is where the name originated. Slump or no slump you could not tell because it was covered with generous sprinklings of sugar and served with warmed cream or brandy sauce. With each bite, I could not wait to reach the warm brownie pudding in the center.

My favorite holiday memory was the Thanksgiving my grandmother and grandfather came to our house for turkey dinner. My grandfather did not drive a car except on rare occassions. This was the one rare holiday he did, so we got out our best dishes, polished the silver, put a lace table cloth on the table and ate turkey dinner in the dining room which was never used to eat in and had Apple Slump for dessert.

My husband's Pennsylvania Dutch heritage has us eating sauerkraut and sausages every New Year's dinner, because it is traditional and thought to bring good luck."

Christmas in Ghana

My friend Patricia Hamilton entered the Peace Corps at the age of 50 and spent two years establishing a nursery to grow tree seedlings for planting throughout Ghana in the mid-1990s. She writes of spending Christmas in Africa without the trappings of home, she writes:

"I was serving in the United States Peace Corp in Africa where I experienced my first Christmas away from home and where western food was scarce. My daughter flew to West Africa to be with me. My daughter brought a battery-charged Christmas tree (1 foot tall) in her suitcase and three great gifts: a jar of Skippy Peanut Butter, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and Welch’s Grape Jelly. These gifts were the greatest luxury I could have received."



Hamilton, who lived in a town named Little Ada, and her daughter threw a Christmas party for her neighbors, a family with 12 children.

"The center of the party was the battery- powered Christmas tree," she wrote in a 2003 personal narrative. "We served Ghanaian soda and played Ghanaian tapes on my battery-powered tape player. We tied balloons to the veranda and every one danced out in the front of the block house... It was special to see the merriment that such a simple act created."

Buon Natale, Nollaig Shona, Happy Christmas...

Friend and fellow writer Linda Capelli Pierce enjoys the yuletide traditions of her parents' combined Italian, English and Irish heritage. For Christmas Eve dinner, she serves a traditional lasagna and bayberry candles as a wish for health and wealth are a nod to her English roots.

But her favorite memory related to a Christmas tradition is how her mother would send her a card depicting the Three Wise Men and the Christmas star, an Irish custom that is thought to bring good fortune...



"[She] would sign it, "3 Wise Guys and a Star - Love, Mom," says Pierce of her mother, who was an actress. "She also would always send herself one of these cards in case I forgot to send her one!"

A Star by Any Other Name...

If Bono can have a column in the NY Times, why not Michael Feinstein?...

In pointing out that many of our favorite Christmas songs - Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" and Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song" among them - were written by Jewish composers, Feinstein captures what has always been the most important aspect of the season, at least for me...

"... the spirit of the holiday is universal. We live in a multicultural time and the mixing, and mixing up, of traditions is an inevitable result.



"As Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists and everything in between, we are all more alike than we are different," Feinstein says. "That’s something to celebrate."...

In looking for something to illustate this, I found this wonderful blog by a guy in Jerusalem who has written several books on the Star of David... Here is an entry about the blending of traditions, with a Star of David on a Christmas tree...

In the spirit of celebrating our differences, I guess it's okay for Bono to have a column in the Times... I liked this one...

Didn't know he was a Sinatra fan!... Incidentally, Ol' Blue Eyes' birthday was Dec. 12... He was a Sagittarius, which is no big surprise!...

Yes, Everyone, There is a Santa Claus...

Found this gem in the LA Times this morning... Wish there was a photo!... Will have to make do with one of my favorites, the one done by Thomas Nast in 1881 for Harper's Weekly:



I don't remember believing or not believing... I do remember one year when I was probably about nine years old, seeing my mother talking to someone in the backyard on one evening before Christmas that resembled an elf while they were doing something with some wrapped presents... I later realized that it was one of the neighbor's teenaged sons from across the street - he was a bit tall for an elf, come to think of it...

There is only one photo of me with Santa, taken when I was probably 15... I was with a couple of friends from Rainbow Girls, hanging out at the mall and we probably thought it was really funny to get our pictures taken with Santa Claus... I felt kind of stupid afterward, but after reading Morrison's interview above, we were probably not the only adolescents that Santa had to put up with that day...

I had to tell my first Santa Claus "lie" the other day when seven-year-old Seiji said that his friend Troy didn't believe in Santa Claus... I asked him if he believed and he said that he did - sort of... He wanted to know how Santa knew how to read and write Japanese, as some of his gifts from last year were addressed to him in kanji... I told him that Santa Claus has been all over the world and was proficient in many languages... I think he bought it...

A real smart cookie...

Loved this story in the LA Times today on one family's tradition of baking mass quantities of cookies at Christmas...

There is great comfort in the ritual of baking, which my sisters and I used to indulge in, often until the wee hours... Best of all is that once you've made ten dozen little people out of butter, flour, and sugar, you don't really want to eat them!...

Last Christmas...

Christmas Eve, 2008, The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center... Went to the L.A. Holiday Celebration, a six-hour extravaganza of multicultural holiday music and dance... It was superb!... Don't miss it this year:

San Pedro Memories

Kenny Bezich and John Burich, both of San Pedro, recall the traditions of their shared Croatian heritage. Bezich, who was born in San Pedro and is half-Italian, says that he enjoyed the best of both worlds, with rabbit stew on pasta, cannolis, and seafood. As both Croatia and Italy are predominantly Catholic countries, fish was an integral part of Christmas Eve dinners.

Burich says that in his hometown of Komiza on the island of Vis, fresh fruit, a scarcity during the winter months, was a highly prized gift for children at Christmas. He tells the story of his mother leaving an apple, one each for him and his sister, under their respective pillows.

“As soon as she left [the room], I went over and got my sister’s apple and put it under my pillow,” he laughs. “The next morning, I’m waiting for my mother to walk in and say, ‘Let’s see what Santa Claus brought you!’ And I say, ‘Okay, Ina, you go first.’ My sister picks up the pillow and there’s nothing. I pick up my mine and there’s two apples. I go, ‘Man, I was twice as good as her!’ My mother looked at me and said, ‘Give her [the] apple back!’”

Traditions of Renewal and Plenty

Loretta (Gilstrap) Adikhai's favorite Christmas memories revolve around her parents' Southern traditions. Above, her family in 1957, when she was a few weeks old; her birthday is Dec. 11! L-R: Glenda (Gilstrap) Thompson, Anthony Gilstrap, Lilla Gilstrap (holding Loretta), and in the background, James Gilstrap, Jr. Courtesy of Loretta Adikhai

Loretta Adhikhai, My fellow December birthday girl, recalls that her mother, who was raised in Texas, did both spring and winter cleaning, the latter of which would take place right before the holidays.

“We would move the furniture out of the way and wax the wooden floors,” she recalls. “We would then run around the house in our socks and help buff the floor. Of course, my dad had the real buffer machine he rented from the store to the actual work but it was great fun thinking that me, my sister, and my three brothers were helping too.”

In a similar spirit of renewal, Adhikhai’s husband William, who is from Nigeria, says that in the villages, many people would paint their houses at Christmas with a type of clay paint white on the top half, grey on the lower half. She says that Christmas in both Nigeria and the southern United States is celebrated as a festival of harvest and plenty, with cooking and baking of specialties like brandy-soaked fruitcake taking place weeks in advance.

"A few weeks before Christmas my mother would decorate our dining table with assorted nuts - pecans, walnuts, almonds, etc. - fresh fruits and hard candies," recalls Adikhai. "The day after Thanksgiving we would start working on the fruitcakes which we would make, wrap in cheesecloth and drench with brandy at least once a week until Christmas. I hated fruitcake but I loved the tradition of going to the store and buying all of the fixings and then being in the kitchen with my mom and sister making the batter and baking the many little fruitcakes. The smell in the house was wonderful. The fruitcake would be served to visiting guests. Additionally, my parents would make homemade egg nog and lots of pies."

For William Adikhai, Christmas in Nigeria was also celebrated as a feast of plenty. His wife Loretta writes:

"A traditional dinner would consist of rice and chicken. Rice is a must have for the Christmas dinner. Many villagers raised chickens but sold them throughout the year. It was only at Christmas time that family members would actually eat one of their own chickens. Beverages with the Christmas meal included homemade libations like native palm wine and gin made by local natives.

The Christmas celebration usually covers almost a period of two weeks, one week before and the week of Christmas. During this period of time you can feel Christmas in the air because every family and all work places are in the mode for celebration. An exchange of gifts takes place just like in the rest of the world. It is a period of time when people living in the cities go back to the countryside - namely, their village - to celebrate Christmas with all kinds of festivities, dancing, food exchange among the families. In the midst of all this, Christians meet their respective religious obligations of attending church services.

Almost everyone puts on their best appearance with new clothes throughout the Christmas period. Various age groups in the rural areas mark the Christmas celebration with dancing and an exhibition of traditional matching clothes. There used to be a joke during the Christmas season that if you are a man looking to
choose a wife do not do so at Christmas time because all of the women are in their best dress and make up.

Kids are mostly interested in clothes as opposed to toys as in the States. However, [when William was a kid] Christmas was the only celebration when kids received new clothes apart from school uniforms. Some poor parents actually sewed new school uniforms as Christmas clothes for their kids. This may sound pathetic but it still happens in some parts of Nigeria during Christmas celebration."

The Toast of Christmas Past...

As a writer and journalist, one of the greatest gifts I receive all year long is hearing people's stories... And one of the greatest gifts of the holiday season is hearing stories of childhood memories, long-ago revels, and moments when suddenly, the whole universe seems coalesced in one united celebration...

Some of the greatest works in literature take place during the holiday season... Two of my favorites are "A Christmas Memory" by Truman Capote, "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry. As much as I appreciate these stories as representative of the yuletide season, I think I love them all the more because of the way they depict extraordinary miracles in ordinary life...

So whether you light a menorah or a star on a tree, here is a collection of tales from people who are now part of my personal holiday anthology... If you would like to share in the fun, please contact me here so that I can add your story... Enjoy!...