Parties Over, It’s Time to Undeck Halls

When the fun is over, there is “the aftermath.”

That’s what Suzy Hall called the holiday detritus of pine needles and wrapping paper that cluttered her usually neat three-bedroom home in Rancho Palos Verdes.

There was the refrigerator too, most of its contents destined for the trash bin. Hall recited the list: “old fruitcakes, Chinese food, sweet potatoes, two unopened cartons of eggnog and 2 1/2 used bottles of champagne that have no bubbles.”

All over the Southland, people obeyed the Second of January Commandment: Take it all down. Sure, a few will allow their Christmas lights to dangle from the roof and the bushes well into spring. But for the vast, tidy majority, Friday was the day to get their lives back in order.

No one faced a cleanup as massive as that tackled by Tommy West. As public works supervisor for Pasadena, he was responsible for hauling away all the Rose Parade debris.

Over the years the post-parade cleanup has become an exercise in military-style precision. At 11 p.m. on New Year’s Day, nine sweepers, a handful of dump trucks and five dozen workers began their mighty task, working from the middle of the parade route outward. Friday morning, they were still at it.

“We find couches, chairs. . . . It’s amazing what people leave behind,” said West, whose army expected to haul away 80 tons of garbage.

Over at the Rose Bowl, Louie Barron and his stadium crew faced one of the grungiest cleanups of all--the locker rooms. Grass-stained, sweat-soaked balls of athletic tape and half-filled power-drink bottles covered the floor of the room that had briefly hosted the Washington State football team.

Out in the rows of aluminum benches, the crew recovered mountains of paper cups, programs and even a few samples of illicit drugs.

“It’s been the dirtiest it has been for a while,” Barron said of the stadium. He estimated that it would take 2,000 worker-hours--covering the better part of January--to get the job done.

On a smaller scale, there were domestic reenactments of that kind of effort all over the area, as families reckoned with the inevitable flip side of a season filled with revelry.

After hosting two parties over the holidays, accommodating several relatives and making 200 Guatemalan tamales, Antonieta Morales of South Pasadena went to the store to stock up on post-holiday essentials: paper towels and bottles of cleaning solvents.

“I’d like to relax this weekend,” she sighed. “The holidays are fun, but tiring.”

Tinsel still hung from the light posts along South Pasadena’s main shopping strip, Fair Oaks Avenue. But most people there and elsewhere were ready to sing “Auld Lang Syne” to the Christmas season.

Take Ellen Taylor of Garden Grove. She began her cleanup by placing her collection of 25 red-and-green-robed Christmas bears in hibernation. That was only the beginning of a two-day job of storing the ornaments that covered her 6-foot noble fir.

Attorney Caroline DeWitt was among the lucky ones who escaped cleaning duty Friday--she had to work. Her San Marino house remained fully decorated as she set off on her morning commute. By the afternoon she had decided she was in no rush to sweep the holidays out.

“First of all, I love the smell of pine, so as long as it smells good, I’ll probably leave it up,” she said of her Christmas tree. “I just love looking at all the decorations.”

In Silver Lake, animation producer Charlie Howell wasn’t about to surrender to procrastination. Late Friday he began stripping his tree of ornaments, though he planned to leave his handmade garlands up a few more days, since they are artificial. The tree, already feeling “a little crispy,” would meet its destiny with a saw this morning.

“It’s sad to take it down, it really is. . . . But it’s sad to burn the whole house down too,” Howell said. “And you know,” he added, referring to a jilted Dickens character who left her wedding table set up for years, “it becomes like a Miss Havisham Christmas tree: You can’t cling to the holidays. They’re over!”

Times staff writers Amy Oakes, Amy Pyle and Hector Tobar contributed to this story.

* TREE RECYCLING

Locations and other information for recycling trees. B2

* TICKET PROBE

Tour firm being investigated over Rose Bowl tickets. B3