Yule Spirit Hard to Find in a Room at the Inn

The printed image of a Christmas tree with a red circle and slash through it appeared on the refrigerator earlier this month in the Doyle family’s suite at the Residence Inn in Arcadia.

After the housekeeping staff posted the notice, 5-year-old Felicity Doyle, with her mother’s help, wrote a letter to the Residence Inn’s management.

“Why no tree? It not fair. It very not fair,” Felicity said in the note she delivered to the front desk one evening, escorted by her 8-year-old brother Nick.

Residence Inn employees posted the letter on the lobby bulletin board, next to the notice that explained that Arcadia fire laws prohibit fresh-cut Christmas trees in motel suites, although plastic trees are permitted.

For the five members of the Doyle family, whose tradition calls for a real tree, this has been the season that an earthquake nearly stole the Christmas spirit.

Six months after the June 28 earthquake and two months after construction workers began repairing and remodeling the Doyles’ gray, two-story house on Baldwin Avenue, the family is still wondering when they can leave the exile of a two-bedroom Residence Inn suite and return home.

The original completion date their contractor, May & Midkill Construction Corp. of Pomona, set was 10 days before Christmas. The new target is Jan. 15.

Normally at this time of year, the smell of Christmas cookies baking in the oven fills the Doyle kitchen; the scented smell of a fresh-cut tree radiates in the living room.

“By now,” said mother Sharon Doyle, 43, “I would have made massive quantities of cookies. Usually there is a point where the house achieves a real sense of ‘Christmas.’ ”

But not this year. Instead, the air in both the kitchen and living room is thick with plaster dust and sawdust.

For the first time in a decade, the Doyles did not hold their winter solstice party, an annual festival with scores of guests who are greeted by the bright-yellow, metal sunburst affixed to the front porch.

Husband and father Bart Doyle, a 41-year-old attorney for the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, said: “Everything is definitely restrained this year. We really don’t have a lot of money and not a lot of space. There’s been a general lowering of expectations, until we get back into the house.”

In the language of her profession, Sharon, a television scriptwriter said, “Everything is basically on a ‘first-take’ basis.”

She said: “Bart and I aren’t doing as much for each other this Christmas. The house is our Christmas present. We told the kids the new bedroom and new bathroom is our present to them. Don’t forget we had to borrow $20,000 to initiate this (rebuilding) process.”

At the house the other day, workers hammered on fresh squares of Sheetrock to replace the 85-year-old, earthquake-cracked plaster walls. “Jingle Bell Rock” played on a construction worker’s radio. Sharon sized up some sheets of plywood, possible candidates for conversion into a tree for the Residence Inn, she said.

Later, though, she eventually decided to borrow a plastic tree that a friend had in an attic.

Surveying the decorated, plastic tree Monday at the Residence Inn, Sharon asked her three children if they missed the smell of a real tree. “It’s a fake,” Felicity said.

Nick, reading a “Ninja High School” comic book, and 11-year-old Andrew, watching television upstairs, didn’t answer.

“I guess having a fake tree is no big deal to the kids,” Sharon said. “It’s my memories that are being violated, not theirs. To me bringing a piece of the forest into the house is part of the whole thing.”

On the downstairs television set was a creche that Felicity made from wheat-colored Play-Doh. She described the thimble-size doll in it as “lord baby Jesus.”

On the hearth, which has no mantelpiece, Christmas stockings were hung with heavy, brown mailing tape.

To Bart, the nice thing about this year, earthquake notwithstanding, is that he “didn’t have to go on this huge expedition searching for the perfect Christmas tree.”

But on Christmas Eve, the Doyles decided on the spur of the moment to buy a real Christmas tree, a $10 leftover which they saw on a lot. They took it to their house on Baldwin Avenue. There, in the dusty living room filled with rolls of insulation and carpenters’ nails, they decorated their tree, sang Christmas carols and, with champagne and soft drinks, toasted “a merry Christmas” to one another and to their home.

Late that night, Santa Claus came, not to Baldwin Avenue, though, with its rebuilt stone fireplace--once cracked and crumbled by the earthquake--but instead to the Residence Inn.

Among their gifts, Sharon got a female cockatiel, Bart got a book of lectures on rhetoric by Friedrich Nietzsche, Andrew and Felicity got computer games and Nick got a boom box.

They also received one item they didn’t want when they opened Tuesday’s mail. Amid the Christmas cards and New Year’s greetings, there was a letter from the insurance company--their homeowner’s insurance, which is paying for tens of thousands of dollars in earthquake damage, would expire March 1 and not be renewed.