What we lost in the fire

“We are never doing this again!” my mom announces. She’s been saying this every year for the last 25, when we first started hosting the Christmas Eve party at our house in the Pacific Palisades.

We didn’t know that this year she would be right.

In the early days, my mom would make a feast inspired by my father’s German background: the Alsatian dish choucroute garnie, sauerkraut with sausage and pork ribs and accoutrements. When my dad died in 2022, my mom had already begun showing signs of cognitive decline. But that year, she insisted on preparing our traditional Christmas Eve meal, only to get confused by the recipe she’d made dozens of times. I ended up having to cook it instead, swearing the whole time and whining, “I don’t even like choucroute!”

In 2023, my sister Katya and I came up with a brilliant alternative: A taco truck. A very Californian Christmas feast. Our yard filled with 75 buzzed, chattering friends gorging happily on tacos. Unlike Cambridge, where my family lives, in LA you can eat outside spread out around a single heat lamp in December. Bringing the taco truck back for 2024 was a no brainer.  And it was also a way to ease my mom’s anxiety. She has dementia now but remains social and thrives on company. Taco-truck-Christmas meant much less work for all of us.

My family moved to the Palisades in 1987, when I was in college. Ten years later, we moved into the idyllic house on Las Casas Ave., where our legendary Christmas party was born.

From the beginning, the guest list was a multigenerational, international mélange of my parents’, my sister’s and my friends. As the younger generation started having children, the list grew to include a maniacal horde of kids jumping on beds, playing hide and seek and making a mess of the garage. A string of wire-haired dachshunds belonging to my mom ran around looking for scraps—first sweet Rufus, then Gus (who had to be locked upstairs or he’d bite people’s butts), then our current loveable rascal, Diego, who sometimes annoyed guests by humping their legs.

The centerpiece was always the music. When I was a kid, my family went caroling on Christmas Eve, wandering the neighborhood with friends, banging on doors, delivering songs. My dad, a history professor and accomplished violinist, accompanied us on his fiddle.

So, at the Christmas party on Las Casas, we handed out sheet music once people’s bellies were full and gathered around the piano. Eventually my son Aidan (now 16) took over on the keys and my husband, Harlan, and a musician friend of ours, joined on guitar. Another friend’s son played the trumpet.

After we lost my dad, we continued to honor him with carols, but our passion for them faded. We sang “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bells,” but they served mainly as an intro to a jam session that reflected the younger generations’ tastes with Beatles songs, Bowie, ‘70s and ‘80s hits. The Christmas of 2023 showed a real shift in tone, with a friend’s daughter grabbing my husband’s guitar and a chorus of teenage voices choosing Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” over more traditional carols.

This year, as we knocked out “With A Little Help from my Friends,” my dad’s young, handsome face oversaw the proceedings from the portrait we’d displayed at his memorial perched atop the piano.

Two weeks later, that photo turned to ash, along with everything else in my mother’s house.

Katya, my sister, lives in New York, but she was still with my mom on January 7. When the order to evacuate came, she helped my mom get out. We’d had wildfires in the nearby hills before, but we never thought the flames could reach Las Casas, which runs along a cliff just a 15-minute walk from the Pacific. We couldn’t imagine that our house would burn down.

So, amidst the chaos, they packed clothing and toiletries for a few days, one random box of my mom’s jewelry and my sister’s bathing suit (since the friends offering refuge had a pool). But they didn’t think they had to bring insurance papers, family photos, my dad’s ashes, his expensive violin.

That night, I awoke at 3 a.m. at home in Cambridge obsessing about “the stuff.” Of course I know it’s just stuff, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my baby album — my mom was a wizard with a photo album — the paintings on our walls, the strange nudes a struggling artist patient used to give my mom, as payment for therapy. (She was a psychiatric social worker.) I wished I’d thought to take home a photo album, a favorite painting. My mom was always bugging me to clear out the boxes of photos, school yearbooks and other memorabilia I’d left in her garage.

I checked a fire map on my phone, felt reassured to see that Las Casas was still untouched, and fell back to sleep. When I woke up a few hours later, I learned the maps hadn’t been updated.

A friend added my sister and me to a neighborhood group chat where we learned that the street had been destroyed. Only four homes were left standing. Later that day, someone on the chat snuck into the evacuation zone by bike and took video of the entire street. That’s when our worst fears were confirmed: We could identify our house only by the metal arch that led to our front yard.

That’s when it hit me: I don’t have a home in LA anymore. When I return to my hometown, I’ll have to find a place to stay. And I am afraid. As a child, I used to love the Santa Ana winds, the hot seasonal gusts, both spooky and magical. Now I imagine the brutal, unpredictable winds—and flames—jeering at us. These increasingly vicious and unpredictable weather events, cataclysmic inferno and otherwise, are demanding our attention. As the fires burn, I fear for my son’s future and wonder if any of us will ever really be safe again.

I lost many things in the fire. Pictures taken by my photojournalist grandfather in Germany after World War II. My grandma’s jewelry I will no longer inherit. The joyful annual Christmas event that through some magical alchemy kept a disparate group of people coming back year after year. But I still have my memories. The memory of friends and family singing carols are fossilized for me, as if in amber.

My mom, though, is losing her memories. And now she has lost her one safe place. The loss of her home and the family photos there that triggered her memory has left her untethered. Staying with friends now, she’s more disoriented than ever.

I spent three weeks with my mom over the holidays and at least once a day she would say: “Our house is so beautiful. Don’t we have the most beautiful house?” My sister and I would laugh at what seemed like a ploy to keep her out of assisted living, which we were exploring. But the house was beautiful, and she loved it deeply.

She loved her neighborhood, where no one cared if she went outside in her slippers and leopard print robe to walk the dog or clip her prized roses. On our street, the neighbors shared outdoor cocktails every night during the pandemic lockdown.

This week calls and texts have poured in. When I told one friend, who used to live in the house next door, that I was haunted by the loss of my dad’s violin, she mentioned that she used to hear him practicing from her house. “Am glad to have that memory,” she wrote. “He will forever be with his home. I would be at peace with that.” Then, she added, “Your parents’ home was always filled with so much love and joy.” This is how I want to remember it.

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