Traditional Tiers of Joy and Sadness

“Oh, look what happened,” said Elva Avalos, reaching a hand into a tiny house to retrieve a fallen figurine of Joseph, including its head, which had broken off. A few moments later in the kitchen of the small home where she lives with her grandfather and 6-month-old daughter, Cristina, Avalos was gluing the statuette back together with Krazy Glue. She finds, though, that the modern product doesn’t work as well on the clay figures as the flour-and-water mix her grandmother had used.

For 69 years Avalos’ grandmother Rosario Velarde created Nativity scenes at Christmastime. What started as a hobby when she was a 6 years old in Guadalajara became a holy passion in 1953 when Velarde was deathly ill and pledged to Jesus that she would make a Nativity every year if she would be allowed to live to rear her children.

She lived and, when Fixations featured her two years ago, Velarde, then 73, was still throwing herself wholeheartedly into her work, lustily chain-smoking while kneeling amid the rococo splendor she had since 1960 been fashioning in the front yard of her Santa Ana home at 219 E. Warner Ave. In that time, it had become a local legend, sometimes attracting hundreds of viewers a night.

While the sprawling Nativity scene is still there this year, Velarde isn’t. In 1992 she was diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema. That didn’t stop her from again doing her Nativity last year, but her illness carried her off on Aug. 15.

For a while the family debated whether it should, or even could, carry on her tradition. “Finally we decided to give it a shot, and went to work,” Avalos said. “Everyone was worried we wouldn’t know how to do it.”

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To see the crowded display is to understand the doubts. It stands on several tiers--created anew each year from carefully arranged wood flats--covered in carpeting and Easter-basket grass, decorated with dozens of structures and hundreds of figures arrayed in scenes depicting the life and death of Christ, including apocryphal ones such as his creating birds from mud as a child.

There is a waterfall, glowing fire pits that “roast” miniature sheep, and the resplendent figure of Christ rising into a cloud of nylon angel hair--which is actually held in place with hair spray. It is lit with a frightening maze of bulbs and wires. (The Nativity will remain on display until Jan. 6.)

As other relatives came and went last Friday, Elva, 21, and her 17-year-old brother Steven--two of Velarde’s 16 grandchildren--sat in the kitchen and reminisced about their grandmother as their grandfather Joaquin sat in the next room watching TV in Spanish. Two burners on the gas stove were kept on to take the morning chill off the room.

Rosario Velarde was from a highly religious family, and her devotion to religious matters was such that she stopped attending church when the Mass was updated, something she did not agree with.

Elva and Steven like rap music, but they are also well-versed in their grandmother’s old-country traditions.

They and their siblings and cousins age 16 to 28 all had a hand in re-creating their grandmother’s tableau, working four solid weekends to have it completed by Dec. 13.

In part, however, it was familiar work for all of them.

“As far back as I can remember there being a Christmastime,” Steven said, “I can remember doing this. Since I was 4 or so I’d be helping on it.”

Such would be the case with all the youngsters. Their parents would be at work, so their grandmother would enlist their help. Each did his or her little part, but it was Velarde who had the master plan, stored in her head, and she would change it a bit each year.

“That’s how it was,” Elva said, “and that’s why we were all going crazy trying to do it this year. It’s so complicated. Even with pictures and a video of it, it was really hard to put together.”

Along with the actual construction, wiring and decoration, she said, “every little house has its own theme, a story, so we had to get the right figures for the right house.”

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If people look closely this year at the scene in which Jesus is talking to children, they might note that some of those children are little Kewpie-like dolls, dressed in biblical garb made by Elva. She could not find her grandmother’s original clay figures for that scene.

In the Palm Sunday scene, many of the figures in Jesus’ path lack arms. Since the family had taken so long in deciding to stage the Nativity this year, there was no time to properly repair the figures damaged by exposure to the elements last winter. Most of the figurines are from Mexico. Many are more than 50 years old and are only held together with paint and glue.

For the desert scenes, Velarde got pounds of sand each year at Newport Beach. In 1991, though, the park rangers stopped her, telling her that removing sand from a public beach was a crime. Now Joaquin Velarde recycles the sand, storing it in bags from year to year. On this particular morning, some of the desert sand bore a relatively Goliath-sized footprint from a sneaker belonging to one of the great-grandchildren Elva baby-sits.

Playing with the Nativity is apparently something the younger ones all do at one time or another. “My grandmother used to get really mad at all of us,” Elva recalled of her generation, “because we’d crawl under it, into sort of a tunnel there, and play.” pointing out a gap under the tiers--curiously, beneath the tiny recreation of Christ’s burial cave.

“We’d do that all the time, and she’d get mad all the time,” Steven agreed. “She wasn’t mean, but she could be real strict. She’d also mess around with us, though. When I was small she used to give me horse rides on her back right here in the kitchen.”

“And take us to the Tastee Freeze and buy us hamburgers,” Elva said.

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Elva had wanted to become a forest ranger before she became pregnant with Cristina and stopped going to school. She stayed home to care for her ailing grandmother.

“I’d attend her and change her IV and all that,” Elva said. “But I felt weird not being able to help her more. The last days when I knew she was going to pass on, it was very hard.” Elva is now studying nursing at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana.

Steve, for his part, wants to get his high school diploma and get out to see the world in the military.

Most of Elva and Steve’s lives have revolved around their grandparents’ home. Their own families live in the neighborhood, so this was a second home to them. The property is owned by the longtime Santa Ana growers Sakioka Farms, where Joaquin Velarde worked most of his life. The family was allowed to live there rent-free while he worked; since his retirement, they are charged $500 a month, utilities included. They don’t take advantage of the free electricity: The family uses a gas-powered generator to light the Nativity.

Now, though, there is talk among family members of moving. Not that Elva and Steve can imagine doing their grandmother’s Nativity anywhere else.

This year’s, then, may be the last, and it is one crowded with memories for them.

“It was hard not to think about her while we were doing it,” Steven said, “because every little thing was something she had told us to do, and we were trying hard to do them the way she’d want them to be done.

“She had such a big imagination. It was always exciting doing it because we couldn’t wait to finish it to see how it would turn out. Every year it would be come out a little bit different. It was something to look forward to and to be proud of because we’d all helped out. It was a little bit of all of us in there.”

As they were talking, some cousins--more of Velarde’s grandchildren who had built the Nativity--came by. As hard as they had tried to make the scene as it had been before, there was agreement when one, Ofelia Velarde, opined: “It’s missing Grandma’s touch. Something just feels different about it. I don’t know if anyone else can tell, but we can tell.”