Christmas songs still going door to door

Will Christmas carolers come by your house this year?

With four children already, my parents bought the big Georgian colonial on the corner of Mendocino and Santa Rosa Avenue in Altadena in 1952 and then proceeded to have five more of us. Santa Rosa is just a mile long, with 80-foot deodar trees marching up and down both sides. Deodars are giant Christmas trees with some limbs reaching out like the necks and backs of horses. As children, we’d climb and sit on the horses’ backs, watching the cars pass beneath, and by kicking the tree limb, we could get the horses to fly.

To this day, the smell of cedar and the feel of that sticky bark still sends me up, up, and away. Occasionally, one of the giant trees had to be cut down and the county would send out a chainsaw crew. Mom wasted no time hoping into her station wagon and getting to where the crew was working. She’d sweet-talk the guys into loading her car up with logs because nothing smelled better then deodar burning in the fireplace, especially when the living room was decorated for Christmas and Bing Crosby carols came from the hi-fi.

Magically, from Thanksgiving, volunteers would string each tree on Santa Rosa with hundreds of lights. Lighting up Christmas Tree Lane has been going on for over 100 years and continues to this day, with the trees even taller now. How we loved standing at the end of our driveway, shouting out merry Christmas, waving our arms, bringing as much attention to ourselves as we could. We screeched out “Rudolph” and “Jingle Bells” and “Santa’s Coming” as loudly as we could, each of us trying to out-do the others — our own performance art, really, as cars streamed by, headlights turned off, motorists admiring our decorated trees, passing by our house on our lane. Every holiday season of my childhood was marked by caroling to strangers as they drove by, and we loved it.

But then through all the years of young adulthood — careers, living in dense apartment buildings — the very notion of caroling at Christmas seemed far-fetched. I didn’t mind too much because through those years there was always the conviviality of friends and bars.

But, years passed, and in my early 30s, family life began again. With two little girls, Bill and I moved into our big, old Dutch colonial in 1992. I remember thinking how it was the house, so beautiful, so needing of repair, that said more please, more children! Houses can speak to us in these ways and before long, our third child was here.

One evening a few Christmases into our new house, a group of about 50 people rounded the corner, many of them carrying flickering candles, and they were singing! Neighbors, most we still didn’t know yet, were popping out onto their porches. My family came running to the window from wherever they were, then all of us hurried out to the front porch. This massive group of carolers took over the street. And as they approached our house, the leader yelled up, “What do you want to hear?” All I could think of was “Away in a Manger.” And then all their voices came together to sing to us, really just us, this lovely, beloved carol. How lucky we were to have been home to see them and they’d picked us to stop at! When the song was done, they all moved on down the street. The tune lingered in the dark air reminding me of the poignancy of life. My children so warm and safe, while other children, no crib for a bed.

One ritual that still seems the most fragile, most surprising and pleasing is to look out the window and realize friends or neighbors or perfect strangers have come by to sing to you. “What do you want to hear?” they may shout out. Wouldn’t you call back, “How ‘bout ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’?”

Excerpted from “Across the Street, Around the Corner — The Road Home,” Mary Lea Carroll’s upcoming memoir, which will be out in the spring.