Rituals

By Laura Saari / Photograph by Don Whitlow

It’s customary to decorate—or at least lay a wreath—this time of year, but nowhere is the Christmas expression so elaborate, so beloved, and quite so excessive as at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress.

We expect most of the people in a cemetery to be below the ground, not above it, so it’s a little jarring on a Sunday afternoon in December to look out over the perfectly manicured sod and see scores of folks milling about. Yet the atmosphere is almost festive.

I see dozens of visitors primping up graves. They’re erecting plastic Nativity scenes and illuminated 6-foot Santas, adorning waist-high Christmas trees in glittering ornaments. I see an Afro Santa holding a sailboat and an Anglo Santa with a pinwheel. I see plots blanketed with fake snow and surrounded by miniature picket fences. Some of the sites are tasteful, and others—well, the word “camp” comes to mind. (This is, after all, a cemetery whose Web site features “the only exact bronze replica of Michelangelo’s David in the West.”)

No detail is spared. Tiny trains snake through alpine villages, and reindeer prance through the Kentucky bluegrass. Plush toy cats skate on mirrored ponds. Giant blue ornaments perch on sticks. PVC candy canes mark plot lines.

Actual gifts wait under a few of the Christmas trees. They’re trinkets, sure, dollar-store expendables just like many of the ornaments. But they represent something the person beneath liked: a deck of cards, butterfly knickknacks, birdhouses. It brings to mind pharaohs buried with their treasures. The oldest mummy at the British Museum, a 5,000-year-old redhead whom the Brits named Gingerella, was buried with her pots and pans. When it’s my time to go, I hope no one will entomb me with my kitchenware.

The ritual may be especially popular in Southern California, says Bob Fells, external chief operations officer and general counsel for the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association in Sterling, Va. Fells says California led the way in cremation, and also may “set an example” in holiday décor.

As I stroll across the grounds under the hot sun, the glint of a Coors can catches my eye. Someone has left a six-pack under a Christmas tree. I’m more of a Guinness woman, but I stand there a second, thinking that maybe the beer was left for passersby to open and pour on the grave, a little refreshment to be enjoyed in the afterworld. (John Wayne’s daughter made a toast at The Duke’s Newport Beach grave, except she used tequila.) Or then again, maybe the beer was left there by a kind soul to be enjoyed in this world.

I hear laughter from a woman a few feet away as she puts sparkly ornaments on a tree. Could she sense I was only a pop-top away from grave robbery? “Maybe his drinking buddy left it,” she says.

A few minutes later, I pass a Christmas tree with a box tucked under it. The box is new—a Little Mommy doll. Its glassy baby eyes peer out through the plastic pane. Just beyond the doll, the seams of the grave haven’t yet sunk into the earth. The marker says “Beloved Daughter,” and the woman died at 25. I wonder if a little child left the doll for a young mother, or the dead woman’s mother still grieves for her lost baby.

This annual decorating also takes place in the other nine Southern California Forest Lawns, and the cemetery spokesman says the operators encourage it during all the holidays. It is, above all, a family ritual.

I see a man talking to a grave where he puts up a small tree. At another site, Louis Gonzales of Corona, who lived in Anaheim for 60 years, tells me he not only decorates with his family, but meets them at the gravesites for lunch. Irma Chavez Huitrado tells me that all five members of her Whittier family coincidentally showed up once to decorate on the same afternoon. They stayed for a long time, just talking.

“To me, this is like keeping [my late brother’s] spirit alive,” she says. “Showing him he’s still loved and cared for.”

In Southern California, those who pony up a few thousand dollars for a cemetery plot have begun to seem like the landed gentry. Our land is too valuable for the dead. Most of my friends who have died on the West Coast were cremated, their remains scattered somewhere scenic, and that was that. But I can see there’s at least one virtue to doing it the old-fashioned way. Those who love you have someplace to visit and decorate for the holidays.

Someone once said that we never belong to a place until we’ve put someone in the ground there. But Americans, particularly in the West, are a culture that moves. Many of us came to Orange County during and after the big boom of the 1950s. Now that wave is starting to perish, and we are consecrating our land with the people we’ve loved. In a place known for its impermanence, we are, in that way, starting to belong.

Subterranean Star Tours

Despite its proximity to Hollywood, Orange County remains steadfastly off the hot list for stone-cold celebs.

Not that Forest Lawn Cypress—where the Christmas displays pop up—is without a celebrity portfolio. ’50s rebel rocker Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”) is buried there, as is Angel Florez of “The New Mickey Mouse Club” of the ’70s, composer Danny Flores (“Tequila!”), and Ken Maynard, a star of ’30s Westerns.

Forest Lawn Glendale, by contrast, is so star-studded that tourists buy maps to find the final resting places of Michael Jackson, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, and even Walt Disney.

True, we’ve got John Wayne, who’s buried at Pacific View Memorial Park in Corona del Mar. And, for 20 years, singer Karen Carpenter rested at Forest Lawn Cypress. Alas, she was moved in 2003 to a plot in Westlake Village.


Laura Saari is an Orange Coast contributing editor.