Christmas Away From Home

Christmas was always spent at home on Eagle Street.  Except for Christmas, 1974.  This was the time of our lives when we were going on weekend drives up north to Soledad, California, to visit Mom's fiance, who was incarcerated at the state prison for armed robbery. Visitation was allowed on Christmas day that year. So there was not going to be our usual Christmas Eve tradition of opening gifts around the tree at night.  In 1974, we would be on the road instead.

I had just turned 14, and my two younger siblings were eight.  During the past several months we had taken this trip many times already and were used to it.  Mom had discovered that motion sickness pills Dramamine and Bonine not only kept the kids from throwing up during the trip, it also knocked them out for a few hours, which was an added bonus.

My job was to sit in the front seat and keep mom awake for the drive, because one time she fell asleep on the way home and drove for about 30 minutes on auto pilot from Oceanside to San Diego. She woke up while idling at the red light at the Washington Street and Pacific Highway exit and then woke the rest of us up when she started screaming at the thought of what could have happened to us.

The challenge of this particular trip was to get the kids' Christmas presents in the car without them knowing about it.  Mom still wanted them to believe that Santa brought the gifts, so it was my job to get all these wrapped gifts packed up and in the back of the Volvo station wagon without them getting suspicious.  I managed to smuggle about 30 gifts in the car and the kids never suspected a thing.

Tammy, fall 1974, with our dependable travel car.

Once everything was loaded up, we headed out for the familiar journey north.  The kids, having received their medicine, started getting sleepy fairly soon.  All along the way, I looked for familiar landmarks--first the Disneyland Billboards, then the oil derrick pumpjacks, the Gaviota tunnel, then the Andersen's Pea Soup signs which appeared every few miles, like the Burma-Shave signs of another era.  Although the traffic was bad in Los Angeles, by the time we got to Ventura, the traffic thinned out to almost nothing.  For much of the drive, it seemed like we were the only ones driving on Highway 101 on Christmas Eve.

When we drove past Buellton, site of the Andersen Pea Soup restaurant, I always asked Mom if we could stop and try some of the soup, and she always answered the same way--"Maybe next time."  And I knew what that meant. In the many months of driving past that place, we never did find the time to stop there.

(I finally got to stop at Buellton and try the soup in 2009)

Sometime after we drove past San Luis Obispo, Mom realized we were getting low on gas.  The first two gas stations she stopped at were closed. It was Christmas Eve in 1974, and most gas stations were not open 24/7. As she drove with a nearly empty gas tank,  Mom prayed out loud that the next stop would be a charm.  By the time we reached King City, the needle was on empty.  Luckily, there was a huge truck stop called The Beacon, and it was a 24/7 fueling station. When we saw that huge Beacon sign, we both cheered out loud.  Once the tank was filled, we hopped back in the car for the final few miles of the trip.

We passed Soledad and headed for the next town of Gonzalez.  It was a tiny agricultural town that always smelled slightly of rotten tomatoes. We regularly stayed in Gonzalez at the Lamplighter Inn, a little roadside motel,  because motels in Soledad were run down and the clientele was loud and scary.  When we reached our destination, Mom pulled into the Lamplighter parking lot.  The Neon sign out front was flashing, "no Vacancy."

There was no room at the inn on Christmas Eve 1974

 It was then that Mom realized that she forgot to make the reservation. After getting the bad news from the desk clerk, we got back in the car and headed north.  The next town, Chualar, didn't have a motel. We then drove a bit further to Salinas.  Spotting a Motel 6 just off the freeway, Mom decided to give it a try.

I stayed in the car while Mom went inside to check with the front desk. The kids woke up and we all got out to stretch our legs.  Little sister went into the motel office to be with Mom.  There was a big gas station not far from the motel.  Jeff and I decided to take a walk over there to see if they had a snack machine. In the far corner of the lot, we noticed a rusty brown Chevy V-8. The engine was running, and the driver's door was open.  We walked over to the car and noticed a scruffy, unshaven man behind the steering wheel, passed out.  His greasy-haired head leaned back across the bench seat, his arms were hanging limply at his sides, and one leg was sticking out of the car.  It appeared that he had started to exit the car but fell asleep in the process. We looked at him and felt a little creepy, so we headed back to the motel just as Mom was leaving the lobby with a grin on her face.  Luckily, there were rooms available, so we would have a place to stay on Christmas Eve.

We found the room and went inside.  There was one bed, a TV bolted to the ceiling, a dresser and a big door-less closet next to the sink and bathroom. In the closet there was a wide shelf.  The room was nice and clean, bigger than what we were used to, and the walls were pure white, not dingy like the rooms at the Lamplighter.

The little kids immediately noticed the wide shelf in the closet and both of them laid claim to it.  My brother decided that he wanted to sleep on it, and of course little sister wanted to sleep there too.  Mom was exhausted from the drive and had no patience for their arguing.  She told them that no one would get to sleep on the shelf, but Jeff used the luggage stand to hoist himself up on it to show her that it was the perfect spot for him to sleep.  Little sister was not one to back down from a challenge, and she tried to climb up on the shelf too, and Jeff was not pleased.  Mom swooped in and pulled both of them down.  She told them that no one was going to sleep in the closet, and that was the end of that.

While the shelf argument was going on, I was unloading the car, bringing in our clothes and the cooler with our Christmas Eve dinner.  When we were on the road, we never ate in restaurants, not even fast food joints. 

Mom loved Kmart ham and always stocked up when it was on sale

Our travel meals consisted of ham sandwiches. The ham was always from KMart, sliced tissue paper thin.  We also had cold Oscar Meyer hot dogs,  lots of Chickin in a Biscuit crackers, and Tab, the most awful soda ever invented.  Mom whispered to me to keep the gifts hidden in the car, and then warned the kids, who were working out their pent up energy by wrestling around in the room, that Santa wasn't going to come if they didn't start behaving.

That warning had no effect.  The kids, still fixated on the closet shelf, were arguing over who should get to sleep there.  So Mom suggested that maybe they were just thirsty and told me to get the pitcher and make them some Kool-Aid.  I grabbed the plastic Kool-Aid man pitcher and a spoon out of the snack box, and emptied a packet of Black Cherry Kool-Aid and a cup of sugar into it. Then I went to the sink and filled the pitcher with water and stirred it up.  As I turned away from the sink, ready to pour the kids a drink, the kids continued their wrestling.  One kid lunged at the other, who dodged the tackle, and the kid tumbled into me and the Kool-Aid pitcher.

The pitcher flew out of my hands and hit the wall, splattering red dye number 2-stained sugar water all over the once pristine pure white wall.  We all just stood, transfixed, watching the streams of red liquid flow down the wall to the carpeted floor, making a modern splatter art design.   I got a towel and tried to wipe the stain away, but the more I rubbed, the bigger the stain became. It reminded me of the story, "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," except I had no little cats XYZ to get me out of this mess.

Now Mom was really mad.  She tried threatening the kids by telling them that Santa was definitely not coming now. The kids were yelling, blaming each other, and I was still trying to wash the stain away and in doing so was making it worse.  Finally, Mom gave up and told me to just go out to the car and get their presents.  I brought the gifts to the kids, and they instantly forgot about the closet and went about ripping everything open to see what they got.  This was the Christmas they figured out for sure that Santa was not for real.

Later that night, The kids had finally fallen asleep.  Jeff was sleeping on the makeshift "top bunk" in the closet.  Mom, my little sister, and I were in the bed.  The big red splotch was still on the wall.  We watched the 11 PM news on TV.  The reporter said that Santa was somewhere over San Francisco, that everything would be closed on Christmas Day, and that the Salinas police found a dead guy in his car at the gas station just off the 101.

On Christmas morning, we hurriedly packed up and checked out of the Motel 6, leaving a stained wall and carpet, and never returned there again.  We spent the day at Soledad Correction Facility, playing with all the other convicts' kids and comparing what we got for Christmas, while the grown-ups visited.  Then the families all posed for group photos to memorialize the holiday.

1974 Christmas Day Photo. On the back of this photo it says, "Our happy family, 1974."

Around 4:00, we got back in the car for the long car ride home. 

This was our only Christmas spent away from home.  By the time Christmas 1975 came around, Paris Young had been released, married Mom, cleaned out her savings account, and vanished from our lives.