Holidays to Be Marked in Many Ways

This Christmas Eve, Thim Pham and Hanh Tran and an extended family of 150 will gather in their Garden Grove home to feast on Vietnamese delicacies and pray around a television set whose workings have been carefully replaced with a creche showing Mary, Joseph, Jesus, the animals and the Three Wise Men.

In Santa Ana, Jane Fantauzzi will cook her New Mexican specialties, going out in the evening to join las posada s, a community procession that wends its way from home to home re-creating the journey of Joseph and Mary.

A few weeks earlier, Art and Cheri Kessner will have unpacked their favorite menorah, an 18-pound replica of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and placed it in a kitchen window so its light falls on the greenbelt outside their Irvine home. On the eight successive nights of Hanukkah, they light a new candle on the religious candelabrum, which symbolizes an ancient Jewish miracle and victory over enemies.

Circumstances of war, marriage and opportunity brought these people from their native homes to Orange County. They have guarded their traditions and customs as a way of keeping their families together and their faith alive.

For Thim Pham and Hanh Tran, their eight children and scores of relatives, Christmas is the year’s most important event. It is a time for the lifelong Catholics to renew their spiritual and family bonds in a land that after 13 years remains difficult in many ways.

Neither is yet fluent in English, and a steady income, always a struggle, now seems even more elusive after Hanh’s recent heart attack.

Hanh, 42, a former Vietnamese soldier, and Thim, 39, fled their coastal town of Vung Tau in a fishing boat in 1975 when their homeland fell to the North Vietnamese. The family entered the United States at Camp Pendleton and was first sponsored by a Mojave grower who wanted Hanh to pick tea leaves. They came to Orange County under the sponsorship of Sister Rosemarie Redding, a sister of St. Joseph.

Their first Christmas was held in the order’s motherhouse in Orange. This year, an extended family of 150 will pack into the couple’s Garden Grove home, decorated year-round with shrines to the Virgin Mary. One room has been turned into a chapel.

The gathering will include Thim and Hanh’s eight children, ages 3 to 21 (two of the older children are students at UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton), Hanh’s mother and other family members, 50 of whom came over with them in 1975.

Most Vietnamese in Orange County are Buddhists or Confucianists and do not celebrate Christmas.

Those who are Catholic have assimilated European customs such as Christmas trees and Santa Claus--known back home as Ong Gia Noel , a man who dressed in red cloth and passed out candy to village children, said Tam Tran, 17, who is disabled by polio and one of the older children who can translate for his parents.

In Vietnam, men from the village traditionally constructed their own manger scenes in front of the village church. Here, because they are a minority in their local parish, Hanh and other men drive to Riverside each year to build an outdoor papier-mache creche beside a Vietnamese Catholic Church, Den Thanh Duc Me Dang Con, Holy Mother of God Church. It usually takes a week.

In Vietnam, they rarely could afford a Christmas tree, Tam said. This year the family will have a Christmas tree and electric lights strung around the house. But with two of the children in college and Hanh unable to work as a carpenter due to poor health, gift giving will be modest and limited.

Gifts are exchanged only by adults representing their family groups. For example, one family might give another family a picture of Pope John Paul II, said Tam.

On Dec. 24, they will sing Vietnamese Christmas carols at a special Vietnamese service at St. Barbara’s Church in Santa Ana, where an estimated 20% of the parishioners are Vietnamese. The family will return home to a house decorated with paper banners. They will gather to pray around a creche, constructed by Tam inside an old television set whose wires have been removed. He said he bought the clay animal and human figures at a Riverside swap meet.

After prayers, the family will feast on dishes they have prepared and those contributed by others. The menu will include egg rolls; roast pig; mang cua soup, young bamboo shoots and crab meat prepared in chicken broth; cha lua, a meat paste; xoi, sweet rice colored red; and cha tom, a shrimp paste.

After the religious observances, “Christmas is like a big birthday or Thanksgiving dinner,” Tam said.

The next morning, the family will return to church at 6:30 a.m., then breakfast on noodle soup and spend a relaxed day visiting with relatives.

For Jane Fantauzzi, 74, Christmas means Albuquerque, N.M., and a deeply etched memory of light filling the black desert night while brothers and sisters, parents and children awaited the birthday of the Christ child.

The glow came from luminarias , paper sacks filled with sand and lighted candles. “The whole town is lit up for Christmas Eve. The tradition is to light up the house for the Christ child,” said Fantauzzi, a devoted parishioner at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Santa Ana.

In her one-bedroom apartment, there is little room to display luminaria , but Fantauzzi keeps alive other customs handed down from her Spanish ancestors and mixed with those of Mexican immigrants, many of whom also attend St. Joseph’s.

Three days before Christmas, she goes to her daughter’s home in Yorba Linda and begins cooking and baking her specialties-- empanadas, meat pies; sopapillas, a fried bread; bunuelos , fried bread soaked in caramelized syrup; posoles, hominy with pork and beef, and sweet chili rellenos.

“That’s typically New Mexican. Nobody knows how to make them but us.” She gets the chilies from her sister, who still lives in Albuquerque.

She also makes tamales from recipes she learned from Mexican immigrants after moving to Orange County in 1942.

On Christmas Eve, Fantauzzi joins the annual pageant held at St. Joseph’s. A Latino tradition, las posada s re-enacts Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging on the eve of Christ’s birth and symbolizes a welcome to Christ into the home, as well as the heart. The procession moves through the community and stops at three predetermined homes. At the first two, they are turned away.

“At the last house, there is room and we come in. There is food and drink and tamales and menudo (a soup made with tripe) and cookies,” Fantauzzi said. Children may break open a pinata . “It’s just a gay time.”

Most years she spends Christmas at the home of her daughter, Dolores Kamka. But whether she is in Santa Ana or Yorba Linda, Christmas Eve culminates in midnight Mass. “We sing and sing and sing, and the church is dark,” she said. “Then they light the candle; we sing ‘Alleluia.’ Up until then, the crib is empty, hidden in the corner. Then here comes baby Jesus. They come in a procession and put him in the crib. It’s so beautiful.”

She often does not return home until 2 a.m. when, if she is staying at her daughter’s, her grandchildren will open Christmas presents. On Christmas Day, they feast on her cooking.

“In any home of ours, you’ll find the door decorated,” she said. Fantauzzi pins a picture of the infant Jesus on her door and paints a picture of the child on her porch window.

Inside her apartment, she has a small tree and decorates her coffee table with lights, angel hair and a manger scene.

“Primarily, it’s the Christ child’s birthday to me,” said Fantauzzi, who was one of her church’s first two women Eucharistic ministers, whose role is to assist at Mass by passing out communion.

“It’s the most beautiful time of the year. It’s a joyous time. I wish Christmas was every day.”

Midwinter in Queens meant Hanukkah lights falling outside rows of brick homes as surely as the snow. It brought a feeling of comfort, said Cheri Kessner.

In New York, where she and her husband Art grew up, “you don’t have to do much to feel Jewish,” she said. “It’s part of the New York culture.” But they discovered that they needed “stronger observances” when they moved, first to Richmond, Va., and, 7 years ago, to Irvine, where relatively few homes are illuminated with menorahs at Hanukkah.

“It forced us to cement our Jewish tradition in much stronger fashion.” Two years ago, they helped found the Beth Jacob Congregation, a “modern orthodox” congregation in Irvine.

Among all the holidays and traditions they celebrate each year, the Kessners and their two children, Devorah, 13, and Avi, 8, look forward to Hanukkah as the most joyous and lighthearted.

Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights, which began last Saturday and will conclude Sunday, commemorates the victory in 165 BC of a small group of Jewish farmers who took back the Holy Temple from the Syrians who had invaded Jerusalem.

When they entered the temple, they discovered that it had been desecrated and that there was only enough holy oil to burn for one day. The oil was used to light the menorah, a candelabrum with seven branches. According to Jewish history, the oil burned miraculously for 8 days while the Israelites rededicated the temple and the altar.

Hanukkah, now an 8-day holiday, celebrates the military victory as well as the miracle of the oil. It is considered a minor festival, lesser in religious import than Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, or Yom Kippur, the most solemn of holy days. Temple attendance is not required and most celebrations are at home with family and friends.

“The only special thing you’re supposed to do is light the lights as close to sunset as you can . . . and make sure it can be seen from outside to demonstrate the miracle,” Art Kessner said.

Over the years, however, its observance has grown, partly to compete with the pervasive presence of Christmas, Cheri Kessner said. Where once it was the custom to give Hanukkah money, now many children receive gifts on each of the 8 days of Hanukkah.

Each evening, after sunset, the Kessners spend 15 minutes singing blessings and songs. Then, each family member lights one candle on a branch of a favorite menorah. Hanukkah menorahs have eight branches to symbolize the 8 days the oil burned in the temple. The light must burn a minimum of 20 minutes through sunset until it burns out, Art said.

At least once during the 8 days, they will socialize with friends, lighting candles, singing songs and playing dreidel, a spinning-top game. Dreidels from Israel are embossed with Hebrew letters meaning “a great miracle happened here,” Cheri Kessner said.

Players spin the dreidel to compete for prizes in a central “pot.” The prize is usually foil-covered chocolates and, depending on how the dreidel falls, players receive all, none, or half of the pot--or they have to add to it.

Hanukkah, like other Jewish holidays, brings its own special customary foods and dishes. During Hanukkah, Cheri, who observes orthodox dietary laws, shops more often at kosher markets and bakers in Los Angeles and Los Alamitos, particularly for souvganiot, jelly doughnuts.

Because of the symbolism of oil to the holiday, traditional Hanukkah foods are fried in oil. Cheri makes her own potato latkes , or pancakes, and, depending on whether she has made a meat or a dairy meal, will serve them with apples or sour cream.

Devorah and Avi make “Happy Hanukkah” signs and draw pictures of dreidels, menorahs and other Jewish symbols and place them around the house.

Unlike other Jewish holidays to honor their heritage, Hanukkah centers on home and hearth. “It is a joyous holiday,” Cheri said.

Thuha Tran contributed to this story.