Breathing Life Into Ritual

A nascent custom is taking hold on Evelyn McNeilly’s tiny Huntington Beach cul-de-sac: For three seasons she has cooked a neighborhood feast as residents adorn a 60-foot star pine that graces one frontyard.

For Wally Linn, the comfort of Christmas comes with a prayer uttered in unison in the family living room every year, and the pork and rice dish his extended Vietnamese family always brings to the festivities at his La Palma home.

And for others, like Elva Rosario Avalos, holiday traditions assume a life of their own, blossoming into ornate personalized rituals that anchor an otherwise hectic day-to-day life. For four years, she has assembled the detailed Nativity scene that her late grandmother put up annually for decades.

Avalos isn’t sure what drives her. But social scientists say her craving for tradition is a critical part of being human.

In living rooms and neighborhoods across Orange County this week, families are repeating the rituals they’ve engaged in for generations, as new communities decorate their streets, chip in for tree lights and build traditions to fill a void that urban life often inadvertently creates.

“People talk often about the breakdown of identity and the fracturing of identities into tinier ones,” said UC Irvine anthropology professor Leo Chavez, whose own Irvine neighborhood engages in a spirited Christmas light competition.

“On the other hand, we’re all looking for something bigger to connect to,” he said. “That’s what these larger traditions and integrating rituals do.”

Those rituals run the gamut--from the detailed way some people decorate their Christmas trees to the recipes they covet--and they include well-practiced religious rites and beliefs that, for many, give the season true meaning.

The thirst for holiday traditions, Chavez said, reflects a craving for community and the fluid process of assimilation that continuously re-creates America, especially in an increasingly diverse area like Orange County.

Chavez, himself a 14th-generation Chicano, is married to a third-generation Japanese American. Their neighbors are of Swiss, German, Yugoslavian and Chinese heritage.

“These are all people learning to be American,” he said. “It’s a way of creating a sense of community and enjoying that, and you don’t have to have been here for 500 years to have it become part of your identity.”

In his own family, tamales always precede the holiday turkey: “My mother tends to get them and my aunt will make them. We don’t even ask why. It’s sort of what you do. You look forward to it.”

Traditions like those often start casually and develop a soothing rhythm, much as repetition is comforting to young children, he said.

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Samantha Oeck, 42, lives with her family on Huntington Beach’s Tahiti Circle, down the street from McNeilly. For her, that comfort has come in the specific way she decorates her tree--with more than 3,000 tiny lights.

“I’ve done it every year for the past 10 years,” said Oeck, whose husband climbed the star pine with a friend and started the neighborhood’s latest tradition. “I always liked a lot of lights, and people always said I overdid it on lights.”

Tahiti Circle’s residents pondered for years how to light the 60-foot pine. Two years ago, Oeck’s husband, Robin, and Wayland Luttrell scaled the tree themselves and planted a homemade star on top, initiating the annual ceremony.

In Santa Ana, Avalos, 24, repeats a longer-standing rite by assembling the Nativity scene in her grandparents’ frontyard, a passion that annually gripped her Mexican grandmother like a holy crusade until she died in 1993.

A neighborhood cat recently gnawed the hands off Avalos’ favorite St. Joseph figurine, but the Santa Ana woman replaced him with another--one of more than 500 ceramic figures that grace her grandparents’ East Warner Avenue lawn and crowd the garage.

“I think we owe this to my grandma,” Avalos said, sweeping sawdust from one of her favorite tableaus as her 3-year-old daughter helped position tiny sheep on the faux grass. “I’m probably going to do this as long as I live.”

Each generation, Chavez said, “learns to incorporate the past.”

Rosa Sarabia, 45, for instance, celebrates Las Posadas, a reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem, with an elaborate re-creation of the Nativity and related scenes in her Fullerton backyard. She perpetuates the event that her parents staged annually on their ranch in Mexico.

“I see so many kids, and they look like they’ve never seen anything like this,” Sarabia said. “It makes me really happy. It gets me excited.”

Even in new neighborhoods, bonding rituals quickly take hold.

When Rancho Santa Margarita came into existence a decade ago, consultants hired by the development’s master planner sat down with residents to craft a set of traditions.

Those have remained, including a Santa Claus who glides across the town’s lake to visit children. But it was the residents themselves who created some of the fastest-growing traditions.

Now the quiet street of Via Lantana is transformed yearly into Orange County’s Candy Cane Lane.

It started with one neighbor, who opted to line her yard with candy canes and persuaded others on the street to do the same. The next year they followed up with wood cutouts and started passing the cutout order catalog from home to home.

This year, the spectacle includes elves, giant lollipops, snowmen and reindeer. The community also launched a food drive, placing bins along the street so the myriad light gawkers can pitch in for the needy.

“I think it keeps us all close all year round,” said Kendall Kelly, 37, who has lived on the street since the neighborhood was built in 1986. “We help each other out when things fall down and the winds come through. It gets the Christmas spirit going.”

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For La Palma’s Linn, 57, a Christian and an outgoing city councilman, holiday meaning comes with the family prayer and the good times the Linns share with the Nguyens, the Vietnamese family they adopted as refugees in 1975.

The Nguyen family--a judge and army captain who fled Saigon with his wife, young daughter and two younger brothers--has grown and assimilated. One brother is an engineer and the other a doctor, and the family that arrived in Orange County with only a paper sack of belongings has since helped Linn out when he faced a financial crisis.

Even though the Nguyens are Buddhist, they have been solidly incorporated into the Linns’ Christmas ritual, coming to La Palma yearly and always bringing the pork and rice dish the two families shared when they first met.

“It’s become a way of life with us after 21 years,” Linn said. “We would feel there would be something missing without it. There would be a void.”

A Christmas tradition has slowly grown even for Jews, many of whom turn the day into a holiday of volunteerism. At Heritage Pointe, a Jewish senior residence in Mission Viejo, managers, board members and other volunteers are, for a fifth year in a row, relieving the kitchen and dining room staff so those people can spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with their families.

Michael Kelner, Heritage Pointe’s executive director, said the tradition is a way to serve the home’s staff by letting them spend important time with their families.

An act so simple is easily woven into the tapestry of personal and community traditions, Chavez said.

“Unfortunately, most people tend to think of culture as sort of like a glass--that it always exists in that form, and if it changes, it breaks,” Chavez said.

As an anthropologist, he tries to explain culture as always changing. “That thing that becomes something new, in 30 years looks like it’s been there forever.”