An {Unstoppable} CSJ Christmas

Religious faculty celebrates Christmas in Brady Hall, 1961.
At right learning on an elbow is Sr. Aline Marie Gerber.

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY. One tiny image in our "Sisters in Traditional Habits" file shows the Mount's Sisters enjoying each other's company in Brady Hall.

At first glance, it's a not-very-interesting Christmas snapshot. But if you know some Mount history, there's a story behind the setting: the old Lecture Hall, now Brady Lounge.

According to the back of the photo the year is 1961. Scores of holiday greeting cards are pinned to the stage curtain in the shape of a row of Christmas trees. A real tree, off to the right, is festooned with tinsel and more cards. What appears to be a pile of newly unwrapped presents -- mostly books -- is beneath the tree.

Christmas, 1961: Just six weeks before this photo was taken, the notorious Bel Air Fire swept through Brentwood Heights, damaging or destroying about a fifth of the Chalon Campus and doing serious damage at Carondelet Center. Burned to the ground, with everything in it, was the Faculty Residence (Rossiter Hall). Mercifully, no one was hurt, but many of the Sisters lost all they had.

But soon it would be time for the holidays! Although the campus was still grimy with smoke and the air reeked of burned wood, we can be sure Christmas would proceed as planned in a new location.

Other details are only hinted at in this 54-year-old picture. Were there more cards than usual that Christmas? Were the donations tucked inside extra-generous after the fire? Did that load of new books under the tree replace some of the faculty's lost teaching materials? We can be fairly sure the answer to all of those questions is yes.

After the party, the Sisters would scatter to their temporary homes -- other CSJ convents, hospitals, or the Mount's dorms where they would spend the next year. There was a new semester to prepare for, and reconstruction on damaged buildings was already under way. Funds had to be raised for new buildings. The Mount and the CSJs' community life had to keep moving forward, fire or no fire. 

But Christmas in 1961, as it is in 2015, was a special time at the Mount. For an afternoon, at least, our {Unstoppable} Sisters could relax and enjoy some Christmas cheer in familiar, if makeshift, surroundings.

Lighting the holidays

The Circle is lit and cookies and hot cocoa await. (2013)

IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS on our two beautiful campi. With the end of the semester looming, there won't be time later to create and enjoy the holiday environment, so even as we're looking forward next week to turkey and pumpkin pie, the Associated Student Body is putting the finishing touches on Christmas wonderland at Chalon and Doheny.

Circle fountain in ribbons and bows.

Tonight is the traditional Lighting of the Circle at Chalon. Everything from the hedges to the fountain is festooned with little white lights, ribbons and ornaments, ready for the the Flipping of the Switch at 6 p.m. sharp. (Our heroic electrician Haig Papelian has been wiring up for days.) The Campus Ministry Band will be accompanying carols, Santa Claus will put in an appearance, and ASB will be ready with hot chocolate and cookies.

Over at Doheny, the celebration is tomorrow, with more cocoa and cookies and a Christmas-themed photo booth. Theannual Christmas Magic at the Mansion will be celebrated after Thanksgiving, a party for all the staff and faculty of MSMU. The already amazing Doheny Mansion is even more exquisite in its Christmas finery. Here's a preview.

Doheny Mansion at sunset with Christmas lights aglow.

We recently unearthed a Christmas tradition from yesteryear at MSMU. There's an undated, un-labeled photo of students in pajamas, bathrobes and topcoats trooping down the Grand Staircase at Chalon. They're carrying candles and everyone's mouth is open. From there we got as far as guessing "Christmas caroling," but didn't know the context until we tripped over it in the 1960 yearbook.

Mystery photo at last explained. 

The caption explained what was going on.

 Warmly dressed and lighted candles in hand, the resident students begin their traditional custom of Christmas caroling to the Sisters. The girls walk from the Mount campus down to the House of Studies [now Carondelet Center], where they exchange songs with novices and postulants. Hot chocolate and doughnuts are served when they return.

(Those CSJ novices and postulants would be about the same age as the Mount students, and some of them might even be classmates and friends.)

Here's to  90 years of Christmas traditions at Mount Saint Mary's University. May these coming hectic days of shopping, cooking, and preparation all be merry and bright.  

Our wandering child

Come back, Baby Jesus!

THE CHALON LIBRARY CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS went up on December 3, and no sooner was the Creche scene complete than Baby Jesus disappeared.  In the spot where the manger had been were his heartbroken parents and an empty patch of straw.

A couple days later, our colleague Cheryl Ocampo pointed out that Baby Jesus was making the rounds of the Chalon Campus, and you could follow him on Instagram, the smartphone social media app, with the handle @sweetbabyjesusofmsmc.

Hello from London.

If you want to find somebody in social media, you have to be there yourself, obviously. So we signed up for Instagram (@MSMCArchives) just in time to see the Christ Child take off for London on Christmas Day (captioned, of course, "Happy Birthday to me").

Well, two can play this game. Hoping eventually to reunite the ceramic Holy Family in the library Creche, we started posting some pleas on Instagram from the Virgin Mary for her Baby to come home.  A week ago, we finally heard from @sweetbabyjesusofmsmc: "Relaaaax....I'm having fun. and I will be back."

At this point we're starting to think that Baby Jesus is channeling his inner teenager.

Getting closer... down the hill.

Classes resumed today and Baby Jesus is indeed back... somewhere.  Instagram has SweetBabyJesusOfMSMC posing in the O of Joseph on the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet sign down the hill.  But he hasn't made his reappearance in the library. As of an hour ago, Mary and Joseph were still waiting for their wandering child.

In archives terminology, by the way, this is called "replevin," which means getting your stuff back that was taken wrongly or illegally. Call this "social replevin." We can't wait to hear about the London trip.

Red berries for Christmas

Heavenly bamboo in front of the Coe Library.

PEOPLE WHO THINK L.A. doesn't get fall and winter color aren't paying attention.

We may not have the dramatic holly and ivy of England, source of all those Christmas carols, but we have plenty of red berries in heavenly bamboo (above), cotoneaster and pyrocantha. They put us in a holiday mood, along with spectacular Pacific Ocean vistas (cleared of the usual haze) and ragged gray clouds scudding across the sky between rainstorms.

Chalon is a spectacularly beautiful campus all year 'round, but for the few of us working in this quiet week before Christmas, it is glorious.

Merry Christmas to all. Deck the halls with nandina domestica, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-LA!

Ruby-red for Christmas

IN THE FALL OF 1949, the Mount's Music Department produced a Christmas album, Sing We Noel, featuring a 16-voice ensemble and traditional carols in French, English, Polish and Latin. Under the baton of choral director Will Garroway, the album was created as a Christmas gift and fund-raiser, and sold for $5 (just over $45 in today's dollars). It was strictly an in-house affair, with recording and production done by the Music faculty and cover design by the Art Department. Vonna Records on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood pressed the final disks on deep red vinylite.

This unbreakable, transparent material was state-of-the-art for audio recordings of the era. Previous technologies, including wax and shellac, were fragile and finicky. The Mount wanted to be able to put gift copies of Sing We Noel in the mail, so the more expensive vinylite filled the bill. Strangely enough, the addition of red dye to the vinylite served to make it even stronger. Our Archives copy is water-stained but the disks seem to be in pretty good shape.

That means they could be played ... if only we had a way to play old analog records. The Instructional Media Center hasn't had a turntable for years.

This is coming up more and more these days: requests for archival material from obsolete media. It is possible, of course, to get old albums digitized -- and remove the pops and hiss that go with vinyl grooves -- but it's expensive, and then we face the problem of what to do with the digital version.

This album has been on a shelf (give or take a leak or two) for more than six decades. Ironically, we're a long way getting that kind of lifespan out of .mp3's. And besides, CD's aren't nearly as pretty as a jewel-colored vinylite disk.

Spirit (and hijinks) of holidays past

Front page of the campus paper, The View, December 17, 1946.

AS THE CHALON CAMPUS closes for the holidays, I thought we'd wish everyone a Merry Christmas and farewell to 2011 with a look back at The View, the campus newspaper that published its first edition in April, 1945.

First, some verse from the first Christmas edition, the winner of the 1945 Christmas Poem Contest (Vol. I, No. 8, December 13, 1945, p. 3):

Soliliquy [sic] of the Ox

The king of beasts strides in the tall brown grass,

And sees the stealthy, slithering cobra pass;

The sheepdog on the hillside in the night

Watches the browsing flocks all fleecy white.

Many creatures of the Lord, I know,

Have features finer than I can show,

But with no other would I change my place

For I have seen the Christ-Child, face to face.

--Marjorie O'Hanlon '49

The picture above is the front page of second Christmas edition of The View, Vol. II, No. 9, December 17, 1946. Even then the Mount was proud of its diversity, publishing a roundup of short articles by its international students about Christmas traditions in their home countries -- Mexico, Japan, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador. The illustration is by student Barbara Lichtenberg '47.

And lest we think The View was all piety and poetry, there's an article in the 1945 Christmas edition about four Mount reporters chasing down the local movie stars. "View Attempts to Visit Van" describes their mad rush to follow Van Johnson in his blue sports car to the home of fellow star Keenan Wynn on nearby Saltair Avenue, where the two actors were rehearsing a Christmas program for the U.S. Navy. They tried and failed to talk their way past Wynn's maid, but, nothing daunted, they decided instead to stalk handsome Peter Lawford the following weekend.

Hijinks at the holidays! A blessed Christmas and Happy New Year, everybody -- see you here in 2012.

Christmas, 1940

THIS IS ONE OF THOSE 1,000-word pictures, and I will only expend a few. It's the eve of Christmas vacation in 1940 and students are enjoying the annual banquet in their formal gowns. The school is still very small. The table (in what is now the Faculty & Staff Dining Room) seats not only the entire Class of 1941 but all the resident students as well. In accord with 10 years of Mount tradition, dinner will be served by the faculty.

It merits a little reflection, this picture. Six months later, many of these young women will be graduated into a world still struggling with the Great Depression. A year later, Pearl Harbor has just been attacked, and the United States is entering World War II. The women in this picture from the classes of 1942, '43, and '44 will come to know the Mount in wartime, with rationing stamps, blackouts, and blood drives; their brothers, fathers, boyfriends and fiancés gone to fight (and even die) in Europe and the Pacific.

Most members of the Mount community have encountered this picture already. A print hangs in the Faculty & Staff Dining Room, and it has been reproduced a number of times in brochures and whatnot. But take a look at it again, and try to see it as a moment in history, a reflection on what was to come. And remember, too, those among us whose loved ones are separated this season by conflict and war.

Oh! antiphons

I HAVE A SMALL CIRCLE OF FRIENDS who like me are fans of the Liturgy of the Hours, and when Dec. 17 rolls around I can count on a couple of emails anticipating the beginning tonight of the "O Antiphons," the ancient short prayers that precede recitation of the Canticle of Mary, also known as the Magnificat, during the evening office of Vespers.

The O's are very old, dating as far back as the 400s A.D. -- a 1,600-year-old tradition that really speaks to their beauty and power. Each of the O's corresponds to a title of the Messiah bestowed so poetically by the Prophet Isaiah seven centuries before Jesus' birth. The seven O's (see the Wikipedia entry for the list) form a Latin acrostic referring to the Savior's imminent arrival, ERO CRAS, "Tomorrow I will come."

One of the treasures in the Mount's Special Collections is our 18th Century antiphonary (photo above), a big book o' Gregorian chant used by monks for singing the Hours. It's bound in leather and wood and printed on cotton-rag paper in Venice in 1746. Most of the Mount students have at least heard of Gregorian chant, and they are always impressed by this folio-sized tome.

The first of the seven O's begins, "O Sapientia quae exore Altissimi produiisti..."

O Wisdom from the mouth of the Most High, you fill the whole world. With strength and gentleness, you order all things: come to teach us the way of prudence.

Besides the 7-day countdown to Christmas, what I love most about the O's is their 16 centuries of continuity. The translation above is courtesy of Universalis, a free online resource. You can download the O's, and the rest of the Liturgy of the Hours for your smart phone, Kindle, or other e-book reader, or pray the daily office with the rest of the Church via your web browser. Now that's continuity. I wonder what Isaiah would think.

Bethlehem rocks

A cave of soft white limestone typical of the Galilee.

AN OLD ENVELOPE turned up in a book donated by Sister St. George Skurla, CSJ, one-time head of the English Department. Dealing with old envelopes is kind of why archives exist, so it made its way to us this morning.

Even in an archives full of wonderful surprises, it's not every day you see something like this. In the envelope was an original typewritten letter dated June 1, 1964, and signed by the mayor of Bethlehem -- the Bethlehem, not the one in Pennsylvania. It was written on the letterhead of the "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan" and attested to the authenticity of an archaeological dig in late 1963 in the Holy Land, during which some amount of rock was excavated from the site of the 4th Century Basilica of the Nativity, believed by Christians to be the location of the stable where Jesus was born.

Mr. Stanley S. Slotkin, the letter went on, obtained some of the rock with the idea of sending it back to museums and churches in the United States, "with the conviction that these stones will create interest in all faiths." The rocks were shipped, the mayor confirmed, accompanied by a letter of authenticity similar to the one we held.

At the name Slotkin we perked up. We've seen Stanley Slotkin's name elsewhere in the Mount Archives, usually associated with one of our treasures. He was the founder of Abbey Rents and seems to have spent part of his fortune donating rare books, whole collections of books, paintings, and illuminated manuscripts to colleges, universities and museums in the United States. Slotkin, who died in 1997, was on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the winter of 1964 when he decided to start giving away Bethlehem stones.

But there was more in the envelope. we pulled out a shiny black card with magenta trim and white lettering, and glued in the center was a tiny white rock labeled "Stone from Bethlehem's Cave of the Nativity, Manger Room."

At that point we confess to goosebumps. Manger Room? The rock -- pebble, really -- is chalky and soft, which is what made digging caves for houses, inns and stables so popular in 1st Century Bethlehem. But this particular little piece of Palestine geology, tradition says, saw the birth of the Son of God. We held in our hand a bit of calcareous rock that is a souvenir of the Incarnation.

It's on our desk, with Mayor Elias B. Bandak's letter. As we work through this third week of Advent, we will have in front of us a piece of the cave to which Mary and Joseph resorted when they were turned away at the inn. Mary gave birth to her divine Son in that cave, and perhaps some of the light of that Holy Child and those choirs of angels and the light of the Star glinted on this little rock.

What to do with it? We suppose we'll add it to the collection of other treasures Slotkin donated -- some sheets from books of hours, a fragment of a 12th Century Quran. Seems strange, though. Maybe that's why Sister St. George tucked it into a book, to be forgotten for the next 46 years. What do you do with a souvenir of Ground Zero in a cosmic shift in the universe?