COVER STORY : Fond Memories of Christmases Past

Before we get started here, let’s confess up front that this is a garland of sappy, schmaltzy, heartwarming Yuletide tales from a world--or a Valley, anyway-- gone by. But hey, who cares? It’s Christmas, for crying out loud.

Bring in the Yule log, gather yourself and the young’uns around the fireplace and hear what Christmastime was like once upon a time in the San Fernando Valley--before malls, yogurt shops, fitness centers, adult bookstores, crack houses and a million people with their ranch-style neighborhoods moved in.

“It was beautiful,” says Lily Gurnee, 98, the self-proclaimed “old lady” of Granada Hills. “There were fruit trees, eucalyptus trees everywhere. There were groves and farms. We’d knock ourselves out decorating, baking and cooking. We ate heartily. We’d have pies--mincemeat, apple, pumpkin--and a turkey dinner. It was good and fresh because, well, we raised the turkey ourselves.”

Didn’t everyone?

It’s barely believable, but just a few decades ago, Christmas in the Valley was not unlike Christmas in Paducah, Ky., or Sowtown, Ala., where farmers’ kids slopped the hogs before they snooped around checking what they’d scored from Santa.

Longtime residents fondly recall their most memorable holidays spent in that sort of nether Valley of yesteryear.

Mary Jane Strickland, 68, who has lived her entire life in Burbank, remembers a handful of Christmases as a child in the 1930s that have stuck to her ribs longer even than her grandma’s rather hefty mashed potatoes and yams.

The first occurred in 1930, deep into the Great Depression. Even though Strickland was only 7, she knew that living wasn’t easy at that time “because of all the hobos that came by our house saying they’d work for food,” she says. “My father didn’t have steady work, but he’d do whatever came up. Some relatives would drop by the house because they couldn’t find work. It was tough.”

So tough, in fact, that St. Nick himself supposedly had gone bust.

Strickland and her four brothers and sisters were told not to expect anything under the tree that year. Food would not be a problem, however, since the family’s two-story house on Lake Street sat next to a large family garden.

“We didn’t expect anything, but we were excited,” she says. “My dad brought a live turkey home. Mom made pies, cookies, potatoes, all kinds of vegetables. And the house was full of cousins and aunts and uncles who had come to visit. We popped popcorn, decorated the tree and had a good time visiting.”

At 7 a.m. Christmas morning, Strickland sneaked down to see if, against long odds, Santa had dropped anything by. The bearded wonder had indeed.

“It was complete bedlam,” she says. “I was so shocked to see presents under the tree, I ran around the house yelling, waking up everybody. We couldn’t believe it.”

No matter that the blessed presents were dishes, pans and an assortment of homemade toys and dolls, Strickland says. She’d hit the jackpot.

The Christmas of 1933 proved more devastating for Strickland. That year, the holidays came in the middle of her mother’s 18-month stay in a San Fernando sanitarium, where she was locked in a solitary battle with tuberculosis. Strickland and her family could rarely visit their mother but were allowed within 10 feet of her through a screen door at her room that Christmas.

“I remember we had to promise not to cry before we went over there,” Strickland says. “We couldn’t touch her, but we talked to her through the screen. My dad gave me a doll Mom had made for me. It was a rag doll in a pink dress. I stood there almost silent. Then I cried. It was very traumatic.

“I still have that doll to this day. It became very meaningful to me.”

Happier times came in 1937 when, two days before Christmas, the Depression officially ended for Strickland’s family. On that day, each of the children was given a $10 Christmas gift certificate. Strickland and her sisters went mining for gold at the Sears in Glendale.

“I can’t drive by that store even now without thinking about that day,” Strickland says. “It was like we’d gone to heaven. The Depression was over. We’d struck it rich.

“By then, I knew there was no Santa, but I didn’t care. I bought a dress, a belt and black lace-up shoes with a heel. That Christmas lifted everyone’s spirits. I mean, 10 bucks! It was a fortune. Like someone giving us a credit card.

“That, without a doubt, was my best Christmas ever.”

And, perhaps, a harbinger of oh-so-joyous shop-a-thon Valley Christmases to come decades later.

Gurnee’s best Christmas came in her family’s Granada Hills home in 1945. The large wood-frame house, built on an acre of land a couple blocks west of Balboa Boulevard and a block south of Chatsworth Street, was surrounded by orange groves.

“There wasn’t much out here then,” says Gurnee, now a great-grandmother who lives at a nursing home near the family’s homestead. “There wasn’t even a church. We had Christmas without a church.”

The house sufficed, however--particularly that glorious Christmas of ’45 when Gurnee’s family was together for the first time since the start of World War II, when her three sons joined the military. Two served in the Army, one in Europe and another in the States, while a third was in the South Pacific with the Navy.

Having survived an avalanche of wartime peril, the boys converged on the house to be with their parents, Lily and Daniel, and their sister, Madeline. What emerged from that gathering is a memory Gurnee still carries with her into her 98th Christmas.

“We had more Christmas trees than you could shake a stick at,” Gurnee says. “I went out to an old market at the corner of Balboa and Devonshire and bought two of them there. I still remember the wind blowing against me--it almost blew me over. I had colored electric lights strung all around the house. And, oh, we ate! I baked for days. You had to prepare to have lots of good eats.”

Good emotions came naturally.

“The feeling of a mother and father being together with their children after all that . . . we were so elated,” Gurnee says. “We just kept hugging and kissing and touching each other. We were all alive! They all came home safe. I just can’t describe what I was feeling.

“We gathered around the piano and sang. We sang all the old songs. Our favorite Christmas song was ‘O Holy Night.’ We sang that and the tears flowed. . . .

“Looking back, it wasn’t important what gifts we gave each other, it was the fact that we were together.”

“I’ve had a terrific life,” she says, “But that Christmas was the best of the best.”

Roy Paul, 71, is absolutely sure that the Christmas of 1948 was not the best Valley Christmas in memory, but it was the whitest. At that time, Paul was living with his wife, Grace, on their chicken ranch in Reseda. Not many of his neighbors and none of his thousands of laying hens had seen snow. The hens got a nest full that Christmas morning.

“People woke up and couldn’t believe it,” Paul says. “They were out playing in it, making snowmen and throwing snowballs all over. They were fascinated, thrilled. To me, it was a nuisance. I’m from northern Minnesota--it wasn’t fascinating or thrilling to me. I had to go out and collect 1,500 eggs that morning. Everyone else was having fun in it. I was out there picking up eggs.”

A St. Paul blizzard it wasn’t. But it was the only time anyone can remember a substantial amount of snow falling around the Valley on Christmas. “Even with the small amount of traffic back then, there were plenty of fender-benders,” Paul says. “I don’t even want to think what it would be like if it snowed on Christmas now.”

Happy motoring at Christmas became part of the Valley holiday experience in the 1950s, when homeowners in various neighborhoods coordinated massive house-decorating efforts. Gil Benjamin, a retired FBI agent who has lived in the Valley since 1957, recalls loading up his old ’41 Cadillac limousine with family members and friends.

“We’d go down to a nine-block area east of Winnetka--to Candy Cane Lane, Christmas Bell Lane and Christmas Candle Lane,” he says. “It was a real focal point. They’d get thousands of cars going through there to see all the fabulous decorations.”

The displays included a sort of Vegas-at-the-North Pole look, with animated plywood reindeer landing on roofs, angels seemingly descending from heaven, fat men posing in spotlights as Santas, and lights of all colors blinking and glowing brightly.

“All my kids have fond memories of that,” Benjamin says. “Five years ago, my son, visiting for the holidays, wanted his son to see the same (decorations). We took him over there and his eyes bugged out. He loved it. Although they do it to a lesser degree now, with kids stealing the stuff and all that. They didn’t worry about vandals back then.”

Even 30 years ago, Christmas in the Valley was becoming increasingly hazardous. Kit Kjelstrom, 39, who grew up in Sepulveda, remembers Christmas, 1964, as the holiday that nearly punched out his entire family. That was the year Kjelstrom’s brother found a newfangled metal-frame, gas-powered Go-Kart under the tree.

The family promptly hauled the high-tech machine down to the vacant parking lot at the Vons Market on the corner of Woodley Avenue and Nordhoff Street and fired up the little racer.

“Everyone was taking turns driving the thing around the lot,” Kjelstrom says. “Finally, it was my sister’s turn. She got in, started steering all over and then none of us knew what happened. Somehow she bounced out of the Go-Kart and landed on her butt. She stopped, but the kart didn’t.

“We all chased it but couldn’t catch up with it. It was headed straight for Nordhoff, where cars were buzzing by. My cousin managed to turn the steering wheel, but then it took off in another direction. We chased it again. Finally, someone got the thing stopped.” The whole experience “nearly wiped us out.”

The only recourse was to limp back to the fuzzy confines of their home, reminisce about the good old days and eat a safe, tradition-rich Christmas dinner.

“You know, those early years were simpler times, less complicated,” Gurnee says. “But the holidays help me relive those days more clearly than any other time. I still feel the emotion. Give me my memories of family. Give me a good turkey--that will do.”

Even if the grand old lady no longer raises the Yuletide main course herself.