Lighting the Way
Last year, I spent my first Christmas in Los Angeles. So I was not prepared for the appearance of the tin foil on the palm tree outside my house. I blinked, as a farmer might at a crop circle. But there it was, this shiny belt. Looking up and down the street, I realized that every palm on the street was swathed with a glittering cummerbund.
It was doubtful that this was the work of kids, at least the short kind. All the bands were fixed at a uniform height.
One thing was sure. Somewhere a supermarket was running low on Reynolds Wrap. Our street has a lot of palms, most put in by the original Craftsman builders. Moreover, though the houses are pretty much unchanged during the last 100 years, the palms have grown four and five stories tall and achieved almost primeval girth. A box of foil, I reckon, would collar three, four trees tops.
Not long after the bands appeared, they were followed by big red bows. This time, for some reason, the precision was lacking. The bows faced no particular direction. One was directed at traffic, another at a pedestrian on the sidewalk, another drooped forlornly. Quite a few simply hung askew. Yet by next time I looked, the bows were all pert and perfectly aligned.
Aha. Mystery solved. Wally, my incorrigibly sweet and ultra-fastidious next-door neighbor, had clearly been sneaking around tweaking the gift-wrapping of the palm trees.
Soon I learned that this was Wally’s gang’s way of cuing the street: “Show time!”
Wally hosts our monthly block club meetings, and our block club takes Christmas decorations very seriously.
Why? Lord knows. But it happens. Boy, it happens.
Though the trees are a hint, the season officially opens when Wally and his lodger, Bobby, do their house first. Light up date: Dec. 1 (though there are some post-Thanksgiving tech-runs).
The tan bungalow is first draped with icicle lights. Next come the evergreen garlands, wreaths and bows. Then hedges are draped with nets of more white lights.
His house decked out last year, Wally casually inquired if I would mind some lights on mine. He and Bobby waited as I hopped on my bike and cycled off to a drugstore to buy some. The ink on the receipt wasn’t dry before Wally had Bobby up a ladder draping them along my gutter.
At dusk, we poured cocktails and stood out front getting a bit lit ourselves as we prepared for the illuminations.
Bang! Our houses glowed and twinkled. To my eyes, the crayon-bright strings in blue, yellow, green and red were utterly delightful.
But Wally wasn’t satisfied. He squinted critically at my house. “You need some around the windows upstairs,” he said.
Next day, they were there, gently fixed with bag ties instead of staples so as not to damage the paint. Several days later, he appeared with a wreath.
Up and down the rest of the street, either drafted into the mood by Wally and Bobby or slapping up the ornaments under their own festive steam, everyone else got around to it. One neighbor began his display with a deliciously jaunty move: He draped Santa hats on his Halloween pumpkins.
Next door to him an extended family, one of whom works in a toy factory, got out canned snow and every imaginable fixing. Up the street, another family wired their spidery hackberry trees with white lights. And so it went, house to house, right up the street, ending with a sleigh and complement of reindeer.
This year, it is much the same. But as I untangle my colored lights and wonder if they might somehow be made to blink, it occurs to me that I may have gone a touch mad.
Before moving to Los Angeles, I was not a fan of Christmas. I used to volunteer to work during the holiday. Now, I am nosing around the fabric district for the right shade of red velvet for Christmas stockings.
I am thinking that a figgy mince cookie in a slightly leavened dough would be a good offering at the block club Christmas party.
And I am wondering if Wally would be cross if I spiked the egg nog with green food coloring.
Maybe aliens did put that tin foil on the palms and transplant a few personalities while they were at it. Mine included.
But there is another possibility. Maybe my patch of L.A. simply turns anyone who moves here into a gaudy softie. I have been plagued with incipient holiday spirit ever since I got here. When I woke up on my first L.A. Fourth of July, Wally had put an American flag on my porch. At dusk, rather than return it, I jealously furled it up and am going to display it next year.
At Halloween, I needed no prompting. I drove to Ventura in search of what I was determined would be the block’s largest pumpkin. This from someone on record countless times stridently reminding readers that it is flavor and water content, not size, that matter in a squash.
Why the change? I am flummoxed. In other regards, you see, I am very much my cantankerous old self.
Could it be some underlying tradition? One might expect such compulsive displays from a homogeneous population. In Scandinavia, or Solvang, for that matter. But we are not all blue-eyed and called Petersen.
Our block club members have no obvious cultural bond. Wally is Japanese American. Across the street, the family is Latino. Kittycorner, there is a blond actor, East Coast-born and -bred. Up and down the street, our block has Louisiana Cajuns, Native Americans, an Irishman and Latinos, and many of our core members are African Americans.
Nor could it be some professional quirk. Among our ranks are a postman, a veterinarian, a retired policeman, a delivery man, a minister and a nurse.
The one thing we do share in common is location. We live in inner-city L.A., in a district that Wally insists on calling “historic West Adams” and that the local locksmith calls “South-Central.”
Recently I got to wondering if our holiday sparkle might not be just a shade defiant. Sure, there is the classic element, shared by Christmas revelers clear around the northern hemisphere: the desire to push back the night in the dead of winter.
But there is more. Behind our tinsel town tastes, there is, I think, a refusal to be cowed. While, thanks to old-timers such as Wally, our street is idyllic, the same cannot be said of our main streets.
These are huge boulevards with the most resonant names that America has to offer: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. And they are indeed like something out of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” except that they come from the nightmarish Pottersville rather than Bedford Falls.
These boulevards are deliriously ugly. What were once proud arcades are now either abandoned or home to some grimy enterprise. Restaurant junkyards are plentiful for anyone in search of a 1950s-issue deep-fat fryer. There are dry-cleaners in once grand bank premises, junk shops in old dairies, transmission joints in food markets and liquor stores at what seems to be 100-yard intervals.
These are no places to buy a pint of milk, never mind a Christmas turkey. Given the blight, I wonder if our holiday displays aren’t somehow mounted to defy the sleaze? Maybe we do it to signal that our streets are safe and that we are friendly. We certainly do it because we like it.
Last Christmas, I briefly imagined that our street was the best decorated of all. Then, as I whizzed over to my brother’s place, I grudgingly had to admit that his street, La Salle Avenue, might have bested ours. But then biking down to the California Science Center and across Gramercy Place to church, and basically beetling about, I was hit by a humbling fact. Every street offered some new amazing show. It was as if the whole area woke up pixilated.
Could we, with our super wattage, be sending a message? Could longtime residents like Wally be banishing the vestiges of the riots that erupted amid them? Declaring themselves alive and well and in top holiday spirit?
If I, myself, have a Christmas wish, it is that progressive food provisioners--not huge, not tiny, but just the right size for the splendid old halls on our main streets--would come see our light fantastic. They would find an able work force and a rich market for candied nuts.