THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512210054
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
LENGTH: Long : 296 lines
A gift revolving among members of Terrie Lang's family has left the Virginia Beach schoolteacher without doubt that it is, in fact, better to give than receive.
This realization dates back 13 years, to a day that saw two of Lang's sisters out for a walk. On a roadside they encountered a dirt-encrusted, size 10, men's black dress shoe.
Lang's former husband, Bob, got a lot of ribbing from kin for his massive feet, and it so happened that that year one of the shoe's discoverers had drawn Bob's name in the family's gift raffle. So, on Christmas morning, after everyone else had received his gift, Bob was presented with an elegantly wrapped box, a poem attached. The shoe waited inside.
``The look on his face was just priceless,'' Lang recalled. ``We laughed till we cried.''
The following year, Bob drew the brother-in-law who'd laughed loudest in the raffle, and decided to keep some sole in the family's holiday celebration. The shoe has bounced among family members ever since.
One year a rabid Florida State fan got the shoe, spray-painted in University of Florida colors. Another year, Lang's fisherman dad got a shoe bristling with hooks and lures, a small spinning rod sprouting from beneath its tongue.
Attached to a tennis racket, it became a snowshoe. Fitted with PVC pipe, it became a plumber's helper. A brother-in-law who sells tires got it mounted on wheels, and a relative who worked for AT&T got a shoe phone.
``Half of the battle when you get this thing every year is to figure out how to undo what has been done to it,'' Lang noted.
``This has become such an institution in my family that now a scrapbook, entitled `This Is Your Shoe,' accompanies the shoe each year,'' she said. ``It's gone among all eight children, and to the in-laws, and even the grandchildren and great-grandchildren are into it now.''
The shoe, meanwhile, ``is looking pretty pitiful.''
-By Earl Swift
The fire department could get an uneasy feeling from a German tradition Doris Doebler clings to. After 16 years away from her native country, she still decorates her Christmas tree in her Virginia Beach home by clipping on red candles - real ones - like those her mother used.
In Germany, Christmas trees aren't put up until the day before Christmas.
In Doebler's childhood, the tree appeared magically, decorated in secret behind the locked doors of the family's ``good room'' by her mother in her native Hamburg.
``I could never figure out how my mother did it,'' she said. ``The doors opened on Christmas Eve, she rang a bell and there would be the tree with the candles all lit.''
Doebler's two children, in their 20s now, have watched her decorate the tree every year since they moved to this country.
She still rings the bell that means the ``Weihnachtsmann,'' or Santa Claus, has come. And she still insists on the flicker of real candles.
-By Krys Stefansky
To teach their children: umoja, kujichagulia, ujima, ujamma, nia, kuumba and imani.
That's the reason Janice and Foruq Rashied of Portsmouth and their five children celebrate Kwanzaa each year.
Those African words mean unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, co-operative economics, purpose, creativity and faith.
They are the seven principles of the Afrocentric ceremony created 30 years ago by Maulana Karenga, a black-studies scholar. Rooted in African agricultural celebrations, the nonreligous ritual emphasizes racial unity, culture and respect for ancestry.
Kwanzaa is a time of contemplation, family dialogue and renewal.
Come Dec. 26, Janice Rashied goes to the plain bookcase in her living room to remove the trappings of Kwanzaa from a shelf: a candleholder called a kinara, seven candles, a straw mat and unity cup.
The family gathers around the ``Kwanzaa table'' and lights the black candle, which signifies unity. They discuss the meaning of unity in their daily lives in the year gone by and in the year to come.
For seven evenings through Jan. 1, the family gathers to light red or green candles symbolic of the remaining principles.
``My favorite is Kujichagulia,'' said Rashied. ``It seems to me that all things come from self-determination.''
-By Charlise Lyles
Hanukkah is the Jewish Festival of Lights and at least one local family celebrates this joyous holiday literally.
The Ruberg family of Norfolk doesn't just light the candles of a single menorah every night during the eight-day festival. They light dozens.
Old menorahs, new menorahs, artistic menorahs, expensive menorahs and even a couple of inexpensive ones.
``I just can't resist a pretty menorah,'' sighs Miriam Brunn Ruberg. ``When I see one I like I just have to buy it.''
Consequently, hundreds of candles burn brightly in the Rubergs' Ghent home by the final night of Hanukkah.
``I started collecting them when I was first married , almost 18 years ago,'' says Ruberg, whose husband is Rabbi Arthur Ruberg of Temple Beth El. ``I have several that are so special and rare that I never actually light them. They're sort of decorative.''
-By Kerry Dougherty
Editor's note: Sarah Miskin, a visiting journalist from New Zealand, will spend Christmas in Norfolk.)
I'm expecting Christmas to be a little unusual for me this year since I will be a lot closer to Santa's cold northern headquarters than my warm southern home.
Undoubtedly, many aspects will be familiar - New Zealanders mimic the winter Christmas traditions of our colonial ancestors, but over the years we have adapted many of these to suit our summer season. Down home, for instance, Santa gets left a six-pack of cold Kiwi beer to quench his thirst.
Our long summer twilight means we don't bother with outdoor lights in our yards; we'd have to stay up too late to appreciate the effect.
Some northern traditions remain unchanged, however, no matter how silly they seem. New Zealanders still dream of a white Christmas despite Dec. 25 being the height of summer. (I suppose there is some logic behind this - if we accept a summer nativity, Mary and Joseph could have slept outside instead of needing a barn.)
Our store windows display winter scenes, and shopaholic Kiwis buy everything from cards to wrapping paper depicting scarf-clad snowmen and over-dressed Santas.
We warble ``Jingle Bells'' despite the fact most of us have never seen a sleigh.
Thankfully, we have realized that it's ridiculous to spend the day baking in over-heated kitchens when we could be outside baking ourselves. While some still roast a turkey, many more turn to the barbecue. Outdoor dining also eliminates the need for carefully arranged seating plans that separate those relatives who don't usually speak to one another but who feel pressured to endure Christmas lunch.
Reflecting on all our seasonal customs, however, I find the thing I will miss most about a Kiwi Christmas (besides my family, the sun and the real beer) is the Michaelmas lilies. It's the heady perfume of these white trumpets that means Christmas to us.
In the week before the big event, we take out second mortgages to pay the premium prices these flowers command.
The smell is magical, evoking in one sniff the entire season of good cheer. If some entrepreneur could bottle that fragrance, Kiwis caught in the north for Christmas might just be prepared to leave out a six-pack in exchange.
-By Sarah Miskin
Say ``Christmas'' to Cherryl Smith and she thinks ``paper hat.''
After nine American yuletide seasons, the native of Birmingham, England, still pines away each Christmas for a British tradition.
She has a longing for crackers. Not the kind you eat. The kind you snap.
``At Christmas dinner everyone would have one beside his plate. You hand it to the person sitting next to you, you both pull and it pops,'' said the Virginia Beach resident. The green and red paper twists crack open to reveal little plastic charms and mottos printed on paper like those inside Chinese fortune cookies. But the real mood-makers inside are rolled-up, tissue paper hats.
``Regardless of how lovely you look in your Christmas dress, you have to wear the hat,'' insisted Smith. The last time she wore the festive headgear was last Christmas when her sister sent a supply of crackers direct from Britain.
``I can't find them here,'' Smith said sadly.
-By Krys Stefansky
Many families have quirky holiday traditions, but in Betty McCarty's the ritual is played out just once every generation.
Women in her family choose Christmas Day for their weddings. Tomorrow, her daughter Sharon will be the fifth consecutive woman in the family to wed on Christmas.
A genealogist might draw their family tree on a blue spruce, and place a star atop it.
``I don't really know how it all happened that way,'' said Betty McCarty, a Norfolk city employee. ``My mother, Louise Adkins, was married Christmas Day, and I was, and before that her mother and her grandmother. That would be my great-grandmother.''
That would be in 1890.
Betty McCarty suspects it was easier to mix wedding bells and Jingle Bells back in her great-grandmothers's day.
``With today's larger weddings it's all a little more complicated,'' says Betty. ``I don't remember my own so much, but for my daughter, well, we have to locate the photographer and the video man, all those things that go with a modern-day wedding, and then we have to get them to leave their families that day.''
The tradition was important to her daughter, though, so the whole family is pitching in to help. ``Somehow,'' Betty McCarty said, ``I think it's all going to work out just fine.''
-By Dave Addis
Many European Christmas customs have found their way across the water. Quite literally.
``Sint Nicolaas comes by boat because that is the tradition,'' said Hendrika J. Howard, a native of the Netherlands. ``In Holland, he arrives everywhere by boat because there's so much water there.''
Lucky for the Dutch, there's water here, too. Sint Nicolaas and his two helpers, the Black Peters, hopped off a motor boat at Marina Shores Marina in Virginia Beach earlier this month. Waiting eagerly for the trio were Howard and members of Netherlands Contact Tidewater, an 18-year-old club for Dutch transplants to this area.
The legend goes something like this in the old country: Sint Nicolaas, who wears red robes and a bishop's hat, originally sailed to Holland from Spain. His assistants, the Black Peters, paint their faces black because they were Moors from Spain. They're decked out in colorful costumes - hose, knickerbockers and berets.
About Dec. 1 each year, Dutch children are told that the trio has arrived in the country. For the next few nights, children all over the Netherlands put out their shoes, each with a single carrot inside and a cup of water nearby.
The snack is for the white horse Sint Nicolaas rides to make his rounds. The shoes are for little pieces of candy the Black Peters leave as a sort of teaser.
Meanwhile, Sint Nicolaas, an omniscient fellow, checks in a big book for children's names and details about their behavior in the past year. He's prepared either way - the Peters carry switches for bad children, and bags of presents and hard cookies for good ones.
Then, on Dec. 5 or 6 - ``I don't think anybody's sure of the true date,'' said Howard - the horse lands on the roof of each house, and Sint Nicolaas and the Peters slide down each chimney and deliver their gifts.
Howard has lived here 30 years and is a grandmother now. But the idea of a wise and all-knowing Sint Nicolaas is a little holiday magic she won't ever lose.
``Even though you knew he didn't exist, you were scared. It gave you an uneasy feeling,'' she said.
-By Krys Stefansky
When she was growing up, Toby Fanney loved Hanukkah, but she secretly wished she could have a Christmas tree, too.
``Not for religious reason,'' she said. ``I was always happy being Jewish and not celebrating Christmas. But the Christmas trees always seemed so beautiful.''
When Toby married her husband, Chris Fanney, a Methodist, she got her wish. Every year the Fanneys and their three children celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas.
That doesn't mean the Fanney children are confused about who they are.
The three are being raised Jewish - Jordan, 12, will be bar mitzvahed next year. They just happen to have a Christmas tree in their Virginia Beach home. And on Christmas day the family exchanges gifts and joins dad Chris Fanney in celebrating his holiday.
``This year is going to be really fun because the final night of Hanukkah is also Christmas Eve,'' Toby says.
As usual, the Fanneys are celebrating Hanukkah with Toby's parents, who live nearby. On Christmas Day both families descend on Toby and Chris.
As if there weren't enough to celebrate, Dec. 25 is also Chris' birthday.
-By Kerry Dougherty
Not a shred of tinsel. No light at the window. No stockings over the mantle. And, of course, no tree.
Only a few chairs were scattered about, mattresses, and blankets or sheets at the window. But Keith St. Louis' house couldn't be more full of joy.
It resonates from the festive rhythms of the steel pans that he and two other Trinidadian musicians play.
``Silver Bells.'' ``Jingle Bells.'' With a Calypso beat.
As their music vibrates from pans that gleam like giant silver spoons, they dream gentle dreams of the traditional Caribbean Christmas that they will miss this year.
The parading. The serenading. The sweet rum drinks. The aroma of fresh paint.
Visiting artists sponsored through the Portsmouth Community Development Group, the players live in a sparsely furnished apartment on North Street. They've spent few Christmases away from home.
``In Trinidad, we wake in the early morning, sometimes around 5 a.m.,'' said St. Louis. ``Then we parade the streets with `pan around around the neck.' We go from house to house playing the songs. And each family invites us in for a drink of `puncha cream' or ginger beer - you must have ginger beer.''
There's merrymaking all day long, swinging, swaying and shaking maracas to ``Parang'' music, gentle latino dance rhythms. ``Aieee, ya, ya, Maria.''
And everyone does major ``house cleaning at Christmas time,'' repairs, painting and all, said Colin ``Roots'' Stephen. ``It's not Christmas, unless you can smell that paint.''
-By Charlise Lyles
As one might expect, Christmas at the convent is a prayerful occasion.
During the four weeks of advent, the five sisters at St. Gregory's in Virginia Beach light the candles on their advent wreath every night at dinner - and pray.
They also join together to pray and bless their tree with holy water before decorating it.
And they pray and bless their creche when they set it up.
On St. Nicholas Eve, Dec. 5, the sisters put their shoes outside and in the morning always find that good St. Nick has visited, leaving little treasures like bows and wrapping paper for them.
``St. Nicholas usually leaves candy for children, but he knows sisters can use more practical things for their own gift wrapping,'' Sister Brenda says, laughing.
Since three of the sisters hail from Philadelphia and travel home for Christmas, the sisters exchanged gifts and shared their Christmas dinner as a family on Thursday.
-By Kerry Dougherty ILLUSTRATION: Photos
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/The Virginian-Pilot
The Ruberg family of Norfolk doesn't just light the candles of a
single Menorah during Hanukkah. They light dozens. From left are
Jeremy, 13, and Adina, 11, and their parents, Miriam and Arthur.
MARK MITCHELL/The Virginian-Pilot
Trinidadian musicians, from left, Keith St. Louis, Charlie Pinder
and Colin ``Roots'' Stephen are a long way from home this
Christmas.
by CNB