Another Christmas in Whittier, CA

In 1957, everything began to go wrong. Perhaps two of these photos were an obvious indication of that. Mom is not really smiling for the camera, in either picture. Indoors, she's clearly not happy. Out of doors, in the backyard of 13222 Foxley Drive, she's downright grim. In addition, she's overly dressed, as are we all in two of the three pictures.

The Christmas tree is by the piano instead of the front window. This is the tree that Ann particularly despised. I believe dad bought it through Fuller Paint. It was white. It was overtly and unnaturally geometrical. It was, horror or horrors, plastic. The many separate segments with the pine needles were rubbery. The branches and the trunk were rigid plastic. I think dad also bought one of those revolving color wheels to give it some semblance of life, but it did not help much. We used that sad excuse for a tree for a few years. Eventually, some of the segments of pine needles broke where you screwed them onto the branches, so we had to glue them or, like a person with missing teeth, noticeable gaps appeared on the tree and it became even more pathetic.

Dad used to take us all for drives to look at the Christmas light displays in the more affluent neighborhoods. After the Depression and WWII, and the years it took for industry to switch back to catering to the civilian market, and then even after Korea, the nation seemed to want to celebrate again--that was the apex of the 1950's. Christmas was a way to celebrate for everyone to see and appreciate. We had friends, the Christophes, who lived in Downey. I think their father owned a profitable service station. In a particular display of excess, which I thought was altogether wonderful then and still do, one year each of the five family members--dad, mom, and the three kids--had his or her own natural Christmas tree arranged at their wide front living room window. Each was flocked pink. Each was the exact height of the family member for which it was purchased. And each tree had underneath the presents intended solely for that specific family member.

In contrast, in 1957, our mom no longer lived with us. We visited her in Pasadena, if I recall correctly. She took us to The Bridge on the River Kwai, a bit of a downer of a movie that gave me nightmares. She lived with two other single or divorced women in an apartment there. Our parents were now separated, the first family on the block to do so on the road to eventual divorce. In fact, I believe the Tiptons would divorce, but not for several years after we moved away.

We had a succession of house keepers after that. The one from Arkansas was nice; she promised to send me an erector set when she got back home but she never did. Another was awful. I was always getting punished, made to stay in my room for a period of time, or getting spanked by her, for any and every infraction. Eventually, Grandma Sanchez was brought in to help raise us, even after we moved to Orange, CA, before dad remarried in 1960, after the divorce was final.

After the disciplinarian housekeeper, and the out-of-her-league Grandma Sanchez, dad's new wife, Willene, was even worse, if that was possible to imagine. So our lives that seemed so pleasant and cheerful in Santa Ana and Whittier in the beginning became a drudgery and cheerless much of the time.

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