Christmas at Filoli

The back of Filoli, a 36,000-square-foot country home in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

In the middle of all the chaos of the elderly parent thing I've been dealing with, a kind neighbor whisked me off for a morning disconnected in every way from my ailing seniors.

She took me to one of California's prettiest historic mansions, built with Gold Rush money, now a National Trust site. What a treat it was.

Filoli is the name of the house and my friend Shirley is a volunteer docent there. Weeks ago she invited me to come to Filoli's annual Christmas Sale.

Shoppers lined up on a chilly morning to enter the mansion Filoli for the annual Christmas Sale.

The house was built between 1915 and 1917 on seven hundred acres adjacent to Crystal Springs Reservoir near Woodside, California. The original owners were the William Bowers Bournes, who also owned a pretty good-sized gold mine near Grass Valley, California. The house and grounds were lovingly decorated, landscaped and cared for, and after the deaths of the Bournes, in 1936, it was sold to the William P. Roths, of the Matson Steamship Lines fortune. When the elderly Mrs. Roth decided to leave the home in 1975, she donated Filoli to the National Trust and the house is now operated by the not-for-profit Filoli Center.

It might seem small to an English baron, but to a modern California it is a large place. Still, it is a very American house: pretty and unpretentious, practical and warm, Filoli makes its 36,000-square-feet look cozy. I guess you can tell I loved it.

Shirley urged me to move quickly to the ballroom, before it filled with shoppers. It has a walk-in fireplace big enough to roast a buffalo, but it looks not so large that you wouldn't enjoy living there. If you had a gold mine.

The annual Christmas sale is quite an event. Shoppers buy tickets to get into the home in shifts and the home is filled with a Macy's-sized inventory of Christmas knick-knacks, decorations and gifts. Four hundred and fifty well-heeled shoppers pay to get in at each ticket time, and some pay as well for a buffet meal. The event raises thousands of dollars to keep Fioli going and if you aren't in the Christmas spirit when you go in, you'll definitely be there by the time you exit.

At right, the shoppers are moving so fast they are all a blur, though one appears to be posing for my picture. She must be pausing to catch her breath.

The decorations are gorgeous and the place is just crowded enough to cause shoppers to jostle each other, just the way they used to in department stores at Christmas time. I picked up a few things myself and gradually stepped out of my Grinch-like mood. Once the Christmas sale is finished, the furniture--which has been moved out of the way for the event--goes back into the house and it is re-opened for preservation tours.

In a state that is also home to Hearst Castle, little Filoli may not seem like much. But it has all the charm that Hearst's Castle lacks, and its surrounding acreage is California at its most beautiful.

RC on Filoli's stairs.

Make time to visit this pretty place, if you're in the area. I owe my friend Shirley a special thanks for taking me away from bedside duty and helping me catch the spirit of old California at holiday time.



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Halloween in Hollywood

Spooky doings with set decoration in Santa Monica this year.

My college friends in Santa Monica have lived and worked in Southern California for more than twenty years. The home they live in is lovely and I would say modest, except that the neighborhood they are in is on the edge of Brentwood. So their house has zoomed in value ...

... and they are surrounded on all sides by Hollywood money and ethos.

At right the pretty Mediterranean Revival home owned by my friends P and J.

At the house across from them this has translated into an amazing Halloween display. Parenthetically, I should tell you the homeowner is a producer who purchased two adjacent homes on the street, tore them both down, built a new house that comes out to the sidewalk, rises two stories and includes a full basement. He and his wife just recently bought another adjacent two-million-dollar-ish lot to add a pool, or a tennis court, or a polo field, I forget which.

Just the beginning of the decor at this amazing Halloween House.

Now, the house also looks like a Hollywood set for a Halloween movie and includes not just the decor, but full lighting as well. Each day I was staying with my friends, Phyllis and John, more display and more lighting were added. On the actual day of Halloween, the homeowner brings in his boat and his cars and pulls them up in front and adds skeletons as the drivers, and lights those with baby spots.


It is in the right-of-way! It's everywhere! And it's lighted!

Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, came to trick-or-treat at this house twelve years ago, when the first such display went up, and now they make it an annual rite to stop by. Six hundred children also show up and so does a special squad of the Santa Monica Police Department, just to manage crowd control. In addition, the family hires private security to ensure that everyone makes it safely through the trick or treat line. Plus, if the neighbors want to call police, this makes it very easy for them to reach an officer.

It grows and grows, like the Incredible Growing Halloween House!

And they don't just give out candy. Another neighbor used to work for a carnival concession company and he always gave out Halloween teddy bears or some other stuffed animal to the trick or treaters, and this family has continued that tradition. So they will be giving out at least 600 little stuffed animals as well on Halloween night.

The kind homeowners gave me a favor from last year's Halloween event on a certain street in Santa Monica. Each year the Halloween bear is different.

It made me tired just to watch them work on the house every day I was there, not to mention what it must be like to live nearby on All Hallows Eve. They were still going at it like beavers when I headed back to left-wing Northern California where people would rather keep chickens in their backyards and dream Obama will make such exhibitions of conspicuous consumption against the law, while there are still greenhouse gases to be curbed, Iranian nuclear aspirations to be placated, and Michael Moore to be hired as a consultant to place an official cap on the right to the pursuit of happiness.

But the day before I departed I read a tiny item in what is left of the Los Angeles Times that put a sort of macabre coda to the story of the Hollywood Halloween House. It seems there was this man in Marina del Rey who was found dead on his balcony that Friday. He'd been dead on his balcony since Monday and by the time police found him he had been sitting in the warm California sun for a considerable time and was in a state of advanced decomposition.

He was in full view of neighbors everywhere since they, too, all had balconies. Why hadn't somebody called police? Neighbors said they didn't call because they thought the guy on his balcony who looked dead was just part of a Halloween display.

Which he was in a way. He just didn't realize it. Not being fully composed at the time.

Beware where you step on Halloween night in the Southland.

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Meet An Unusual Saint

I have a friend named Christine who has a very big heart and very good sense of humor. And if you sit with her any time at all she has you laughing so hard you are crying. Perhaps it is because she is Italian and from Long Island and her New York sense of humor is so familiar: almost all the famous comedians in the world come from New York, so the cadence of the New York voice helps the humor along quite a bit. Maybe it is in the water there. Or in this case, maybe it is in the water in the baptismal font.



I didn't know Christine long before she told me about St. Helen the Patron Saint of Parking. Not being a Catholic, I wasn't sure if I should laugh at this or not. Oh yes indeed, Christine said. St. Helen the Patron Saint of Parking is her late mother, Helen B., who, upon her death achieved beatification in order to look out for all of us women who, when shopping, find ourselves endlessly in search of a place to put the car.

It was funny enough to hear that she had elevated her mother to sainthood, and funnier still that this sainthood involved parking. But it got better. As my sister and I looked on, Christine went out to her car and produced St. Helen's prayer card, something with which, as Protestants, we were not familiar.

St. Helen's prayer card, not yet sanctioned by the Vatican, is laminated and carries a picture of a halo-ed St. Helen standing by--what else?--a car. The photo had originally been of Helen B. on her honeymoon, standing by the car she and Christine's father drove down to Florida. Of course she's smiling. She's on her honeymoon. And, since she was in Florida at the time, she was wearing a big straw hat.

With a little help from Photoshop, the hat became a halo, and the halo seems to turn Helen's sly honeymoon smile into something more angelic. On the back of the card is this prayer:

Dear Helen in Heaven
Help me find my space
I don't want to look
All over the place

Give me a good one
So I'll know where to steer
When it comes to parking
You're always near

Sweet Helen in Heaven
I don't pray a lot
But please help me find
A good parking spot
Amen

My sister and I were laughing pretty hard at this point. "It seems so sacrilegious," she said sotto voce to me as she wiped away her tears. "But I just can't stop laughing. It is such a funny thing to do with your late mother's picture."

Christine looks a lot like her mother, who died when Christine was just 21. Though the death took place a long time ago, the thought of it is still painful to Christine who will tell you that in a quiet moment. It was a heart attack or a stroke--I can't remember which--and one minute Helen was there, and the next she was gone. Christine didn't even have time to say goodbye.

At the root of almost all humor is pain. Christine dealt with hers by turning her mother into the Patron Saint of Parking. And the laughter that brings to each of Christine's friends helps to keep the memory of Helen a sunny one. What a lovely thing.

Christine insisted on giving me one of St. Helen's prayer cards to keep in my car.

And I've kept it there for years through various vehicles. It reminds me of Christine and her sense of fun. And it makes me think how each of us can take the clay of our sorrow and mold it in to something else, something that will make it easier for us to go forward with our lives--not forgetting, but no longer with tears.

So I keep St. Helen's prayer card in my car, and it makes me smile.

And one more thing. I never, ever, have to look for a parking place.



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