Often Just Parcels Go Home for the Holidays

Californians, a notoriously mobile people, do not often pine for that lost place they once called “home.” Except, perhaps, in the days leading up to the Christmas holidays.

On Monday, the busiest day of the year at American post offices, tens of thousands of people rushed to send packages to relatives many, many miles and time zones away--an annual testament to a society struggling to keep family ties alive in a rootless age.

“All my relatives live out of town,” said Michele Fowler, who hauled more than 80 pounds of packages to the Pasadena post office. “I don’t have anyone here.”

Fowler, an employee at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, rattled off a veritable atlas of destinations to which her packages were headed: Idaho, Oregon, Iowa, Colorado and Texas.

It was a scene repeated across California and the nation as people made one last, harried effort to show their mothers, brothers, uncles, cousins and, in many cases, their children that they still care.

Postal officials estimated they would postmark 280 million cards and letters nationwide Monday, almost three times the normal flow.

Nowhere were the stacks of Christmas cards, fruitcakes and other holiday mail as high as in California, the state where the largest amount of mail originates. On Monday, 7 million cards and letters were postmarked in Southern California alone.

A couple of postal axioms combined to make this Monday--the next to last before Christmas--the busiest mail day, said David Mazer, a post office spokesman in Los Angeles.

“Most people do their cards and letters over the weekend,” Mazer said. “If you mailed it [Monday], it would be no problem for us to get it anywhere in the United States by Christmas. But if you sent it next Monday [Dec. 22], we’d be hard-pressed to deliver it before” the holiday.

No one wants their cards or presents to arrive Dec. 26. Thus the large number of people filing through the warehouse-sized post office on World Way near Los Angeles International Airport.

Among the many customers at the airport post office, the city’s biggest, was Erika Hoffman, a resident of Culver City and native of Switzerland. Hoffman was sending sweaters and other gifts to her Swiss brothers and sisters, and also to her son in Tennessee.

This Christmas was especially hard, Hoffman said, because her father died recently in Switzerland. She remembered how he used to go into the forest and cut down a tree, bringing it home for the children to decorate.

“I’m torn between spending Christmas with my children and grandchildren here and being with my brothers and sisters,” she said. “Since my parents passed away, we miss each other more now.”

For Jeffrey Hutter, a psychotherapist and instructor at UCLA Extension, the days before Christmas are the flip side of the transitory, forward-looking spirit for which California is famous.

More than half of Californians were not born here. About 7 million were born outside the country and 9 million in other states.

“There’s a tradition of people coming to California because they were unhappy where they were,” Hutter said. “They felt they could deal with their problems best if they could move away to a place with greater opportunity.”

During the holidays, however, “people feel the transience and the impermanence of their lives,” Hutter said.

Linnea Whitelaw, 42, was a free-spirited twentysomething when she came to the United States from Newcastle, England.

“I was young and fascinated with the states,” Whitelaw said. Although she has lived in this country ever since, this Christmas will be the first in many years she has not returned to visit her parents, two sisters, brother and nieces and nephews in England.

She said she misses Christmas in England, where shopping is a secondary concern because “everything closes down . . . and you just spend time with your family.”

Hilde Byrne shared similar fond recollections of her native Norway while waiting in line at the Sherman Way post office in the San Fernando Valley. She was sending her package to Oslo and the extended family that her 3-year-old son Leif Erik barely knows.

“You spend time cooking and with your relatives,” Byrne said of her Christmases in Norway. “The baking starts right at the beginning of the month, the first of December.” And then there’s the snow. “One year it was so cold the mercury disappeared from the thermometer.”

Last year, Byrne went back to Oslo for the first time in seven years. “I came to L.A. . . . 11 years ago,” Byrne said. She came to California, she said, to continue her dancing career and now works for the Long Beach Ballet Arts Center teaching young students.

Some Californians use the mail to try to keep family customs alive, despite the long distances separating relatives.

As she stood in line at the Santa Monica post office, Joanne Pittard, 55, recounted how her octogenarian father still sends homemade popcorn balls from upstate New York to his adult children--including four daughters now in California.

This Christmas, Joanne won’t be able to travel back east to Latham, N.Y., to see her father or share in the family’s Russian Orthodox traditions, which include a big Christmas Eve dinner.

“To me the holiday turns out to be anticlimactic,” she said. “It’s nice to share holidays with little children, but if there are none around, it turns out to be sort of an empty and vacant day.”

Pittard’s daughter, Joanna, will be traveling to Latham, however. She might arrive about the same time as the large package she and her mother were sending through the mail.

“I used to spend a lot of time there as a kid,” said Joanna, 34. “It’s really important to me to see [my grandfather] because I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

Not long after the Pittards had sent off their package, Shannon Graham and Joe Eash arrived at the post office with mail for three states.

The couple moved to Marina del Rey from Concord, Calif., a few months ago when Eash got a job developing software for mortgage companies.

Her family is from Coos Bay, Ore., a town of about 9,000. His is split between Northern California and Arizona, and the packages they had Monday were destined for both places.

Graham said she has gotten used to being separated from her family.

“I miss my family, but from where I came from, it’s a lot better here,” she said. “There’s more opportunity and there’s more going on.”

Times staff writer Amy Oakes and correspondents Tracy Johnson and Sue McAllister contributed to this story.