This poignant piece recounts the author's family Christmas celebrations, highlighting the evolution of traditions and the impact of her father's passing. The narrative takes a dramatic turn as a wildfire threatens their beloved home in the Pacific Palisades.
A scene from the author's family's annual Christmas Eve party at their home in the Pacific Palisades. The author's late father, Michael Meyer, is playing the violin. (Courtesy Andrea Meyer)“We are never doing this again!” my mom announces. She’s been saying this every year for the last 25, when we first started hosting the Christmas Eve party at our house in the Pacific Palisades.
In the early days, my mom would make a feast inspired by my father’s German background: the Alsatian dish, sauerkraut with sausage and pork ribs and accoutrements. When my dad died in 2022, my mom had already begun showing signs of cognitive decline. But that year, she insisted on preparing our traditional Christmas Eve meal, only to get confused by the recipe she’d made dozens of times. I ended up having to cook it instead, swearing the whole time and whining, “I don’t even likeIn 2023, my sister Katya and I came up with a brilliant alternative: A taco truck. A very Californian Christmas feast. Our yard filled with 75 buzzed, chattering friends gorging happily on tacos. Unlike Cambridge, where my family lives, in LA you can eat outside spread out around a single heat lamp in December. Bringing the taco truck back for 2024 was a no brainer. And it was also a way to ease my mom’s anxiety. She has dementia now but remains social and thrives on company. Taco-truck-Christmas meant much less work for all of us. My family moved to the Palisades in 1987, when I was in college. Ten years later, we moved into the idyllic house on Las Casas Ave., where our legendary Christmas party was born.From the beginning, the guest list was a multigenerational, international mélange of my parents’, my sister’s and my friends. As the younger generation started having children, the list grew to include a maniacal horde of kids jumping on beds, playing hide and seek and making a mess of the garage. A string of wire-haired dachshunds belonging to my mom ran around looking for scraps—first sweet Rufus, then Gus (who had to be locked upstairs or he’d bite people’s butts), then our current loveable rascal, Diego, who sometimes annoyed guests by humping their legs. The centerpiece was always the music. When I was a kid, my family went caroling on Christmas Eve, wandering the neighborhood with friends, banging on doors, delivering songs. My dad, a history professor and accomplished violinist, accompanied us on his fiddle. So, at the Christmas party on Las Casas, we handed out sheet music once people’s bellies were full and gathered around the piano. Eventually my son Aidan (now 16) took over on the keys and my husband, Harlan, and a musician friend of ours, joined on guitar. Another friend’s son played the trumpet.After we lost my dad, we continued to honor him with carols, but our passion for them faded. We sang “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bells,” but they served mainly as an intro to a jam session that reflected the younger generations’ tastes with Beatles songs, Bowie, ‘70s and ‘80s hits. The Christmas of 2023 showed a real shift in tone, with a friend’s daughter grabbing my husband’s guitar and a chorus of teenage voices choosing Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” over more traditional carols. This year, as we knocked out “With A Little Help from my Friends,” my dad’s young, handsome face oversaw the proceedings from the portrait we’d displayed at his memorial perched atop the piano.Katya, my sister, lives in New York, but she was still with my mom on January 7. When the order to evacuate came, she helped my mom get out. We’d had wildfires in the nearby hills before, but we never thought the flames could reach Las Casas, which runs along a cliff just a 15-minute walk from the Pacific. We couldn’t imagine that our house would burn down. Wildfire smoke, as seen from the back of the house on Las Casas Ave., on January 7, 2025. (Courtesy Andrea Meyer) So, amidst the chaos, they packed clothing and toiletries for a few days, one random box of my mom’s jewelry and my sister’s bathing suit (since the friends offering refuge had a pool). But they didn’t think they had to bring insurance papers, family photos, my dad’s ashes, his expensive violin. That night, I awoke at 3 a.m. at home in Cambridge obsessing about “the stuff.” Of course I know it’s just stuff, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my baby album — my mom was a wizard with a photo album — the paintings on our walls, the strange nudes a struggling artist patient used to give my mom, as payment for therapy. (She was a psychiatric social worker.) I wished I’d thought to take home a photo album, a favorite painting. My mom was always bugging me to clear out the boxes of photos, school yearbooks and other memorabilia I’d left in her garage. I checked a fire map on my phone, felt reassured to see that Las Casas was still untouched, and fell back to sleep. When I woke up a few hours later, I learned the maps hadn’t been update
FAMILY CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS WILDFIRES LOSS MEMORIES CALIFORNIA HOME
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