The spirit of Christmases past and present

Fifty years ago, the editors of the Saturday Evening Post, casting about for a story to lead their Christmas issue, sent me a clipping from the internal house organ of the International Harvester Company in Chicago. It was a two paragraph item about an IHC factory worker who spent his free time and savings renting movies to show to kids in hospitals in the Chicago area. With their customary inbred suspicion, the editors asked me to check him out and see if he was for real.

I did, and he decidedly was.

The result was a piece in the Dec. 25, 1954, Post called “The Secret Life of Joe Swedie.” In researching and writing that story, I made a lifetime friend and got a new and fresh vision of Christmas giving. As a result of this article, Joe was anointed by Ralph Edwards as a subject for “This Is Your Life” and was offered help he never sought but accepted gratefully on behalf of his kids.

For many years -- until we moved to California -- Joe would stop by our house at night after a hospital visit when he had a movie he thought my children would enjoy. We would get them up and put on coffee for Joe while he showed the movie on our living room wall.

Joe wasn’t one for letter writing, and we lost touch with him after we moved away, but according to his obituary, sent to us years later by a friend, he continued his hospital visits virtually up to the day he died.

Christmas never comes and goes without thoughts of Joe Swedie, and this year they were especially powerful because he was reincarnated right in my own family.

When my niece, Jessica Angel, was serving as a volunteer in a children’s oncology hospital ward, she was appalled to see these troubled children immersed -- day in and day out -- in the isolation of mind-numbing television. In her determination to offer them something better, Jessie turned quite naturally to movies.

Her father, Dan Angel, was one of the producers of an Emmy-winning TV movie, and Jessie has long shared this passion with him. So she had a base to draw on in aiding and abetting the birth of what is now a growing nonprofit enterprise called “Reel Angels.”

Hospital-bound children see movies advertised on TV but can’t see the movies until many months later when they are converted to video and DVD, and only then in the isolation of their own beds.

Jessie set out to find a way to create a communal experience for these kids by showing them first-run theatrical films in a setting they could share with fellow patients. This required a lot of help, and she has found a generous supply -- especially from studios and producers who make their family films available and the Elf Foundation, a charity that has installed three dozen full-blown theaters in children’s hospitals around the country. These theaters offer an ideal venue for Reel Angels’ films, as well as the stars they recruit to visit the hospitals.

In less than a year, Jessie’s vision has reached out across the country. (For more information, check out www.reelangels.com.) Many hundreds of sick kids whose world is bordered by the sterile walls of hospitals have enjoyed several hours of magic because of that vision.

Joe Swedie would surely be proud of her.

*

During the 23 years we’ve lived in our Santa Ana Heights home, I’ve written frequently about the joy and satisfactions and luck of being put down in a real neighborhood of caring people. The cast has changed over the years, but not the caring.

Never is that more in evidence than during the holidays when we congregate at our annual neighborhood Christmas party and decorate our streets with luminarias.

We pass the party around, and it ended at our house last week. I don’t know if it was even more warming than usual or I was more open to the warmth, but I know I felt it especially powerfully.

When you get more than 30 people crowded around a piano in a living room singing Christmas carols, mostly off key and at full volume, there is joyful juice to burn.

What struck me especially this year was the easy and frequent cross-pollination of generations. Some of the young families that lived here when Sherry and I moved in are now producing grandchildren, and all three generations were represented. Meanwhile, new young families have settled here and are keeping us young with a fresh batch of small people. And they were all commingling Friday night.

Dueling pianos provided the main entertainment. Sherry traditionally holds forth at the piano during the Christmas carols. But she was followed this year by a revolving cadre of piano players, ranging from 10-year-olds to our godfather, Jim Altobelli -- of indeterminate age -- who can convert a carol to jazz on demand. There was considerably more talent at the piano than in the chorus, but not more volume.

The middle generation, kids who grew up here and then disappeared into new lives, were better represented than usual.

They are scattered about the world, but for one Christmas night, they re-connected in the common place they will always share.

I found the continuity of this process stabilizing and somehow encouraging in chaotic and divisive times.

Maybe that, finally, is what Christmas is all about. Connecting.

So happy holidays from Santa Ana Heights -- and c’mon over and see our luminarias on Christmas Eve.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

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