Christmas Flourishes

A kind of populist yuletide ritual is flourishing far from front yards, transforming the graves of loved ones into festive tableaux. Like memorial walls and the spontaneous shrines that appeared in Union Square in Manhattan after 9/11, displays in scores of cemeteries are at once intimate and public, their sheer exuberance often posing challenges for cemetery officials who find themselves issuing decorating regulations and occasionally enacting crackdowns on “nonconforming” grave décor.

At the three cemeteries run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, Christmas decorating is now officially limited to flowers placed in a maximum of two urns and potted evergreens no more than 12 inches high, with weekly sweeps on offending Santa Claus blankets, Styrofoam candy canes and the like.

“Decorations can be an impediment to backhoes, and there are liability issues in tripping over candy canes,” said Kathy Atkinson, the director of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. “People understand this with their head,” she added. “But with their heart they need to do something.”

Though the tradition of decorating ancestors’ graves is an ancient one, most commonly associated in the United States with El Dia de los Muertos, or the Mexican and Latin American Catholic folk tradition of The Day of the Dead, the ritual is gaining a broader embrace.

From the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago, where many people of Czech descent are buried, to San Fernando Cemetery II in San Antonio, and Asian cemeteries of Orange County, the decorations are so elaborate that they are being studied by folklorists

In Culver City from Dec. 14 through Jan. 9, the official window for holiday decorating, the normally staid landscape of Holy Cross, one of 11 Catholic cemeteries run by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, becomes a glittering tribute to family creativity and loss. Many of the displays offer a collective act of devotion born from the unpredictability of life itself car crashes, freak accidents, illnesses, murders, the incomprehensible sudden death of a child.

Milly Rodriguez spent four days decorating the grave of her daughter Vanessa, who died of cystic fibrosis last October at age 10, after a year in and out of Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. Mrs. Rodriguez festooned her holiday tribute with Disney princess lights and a Cinderella doll as the star. During visits, she uses the cigarette lighter in her car as a power source to light up the tree. The display is proof to her daughter “that life is still out there,” she said.

Although lights are officially prohibited by the archdiocese along with trees taller than two feet, battery and electrically operated equipment, anchoring spikes, easily breakable ornaments and standing Santa Clauses, Nutcracker figures, snowmen the urge to create has snowballed, making enforcement difficult. As when suburbanites bicker over property lines, tension among families occasionally occurs when displays spill over to neighboring headstones.

Around the country, this is the season when cemeteries become homes for many families’ second Christmas tree, where devotion meets tinsel, “Let It Snow” garden ornaments and the occasional Santa swizzle stick.

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