Jim Clarke, perhaps the most Christmas-oriented member of the City Council, will spend today exactly the way his Catholic teachers urged:
Alongside Mayor Mehaul O’Leary, who also is single, “I will help serve (300) great Christmas lunches-dinners at the Senior Center, as I did last year,” Mr. Clarke said.
Sure, he said with impressive honesty, “I look forward to Christmas every year. It’s a great time to spend with friends and family. It also is a good opportunity to assess what we (on the City Council) did during the year, look back with a lot of pride at what we have accomplished.”
Midnight Mass positively is a staple of Mr. Clarke’s Christmas, though not always in the order he practiced while growing up in the Bay Area community of Pleasant Hill.
Mr. Clarke’s beloved god-daughter, Nora, had just stepped into the car, and her presence – and her presents – tied into his Christmas story.
“Nora’s mom sings in the choir at All Saints Episcopal Church, Beverly Hills,” he said. “So we will be going to that (midnight) service. Of course, that is Catholic Light.
“So I will have to be going to Catholic services (at St. Augustine) on Christmas morning.”
What is the difference between Christmas as a young man growing up in the Bay Area and Christmas as a mature person in Culver City, his home for the past 38 years?
“The difference is the excitement I get shopping for my lovely god-daughter Nora and her excitement,” Mr. Clarke said, “at all of the presents people get for her for Christmas.”
Favorite day – Christmas Eve or Christmas Day?
“Always Christmas Eve. Growing up, we would go to Midnight Mass and then we would come home, make a breakfast and then start opening gifts. Some of them. The rest on Christmas Day.
“We would go to Midnight Mass at St. Mary’s College with the brothers over in Moraga, through the Rheem Valley. It would be foggy and cold every year. Driving along, you could hear the Christmas carols coming from the carillon.”
His best-ever Christmas, said Mr. Clarke, was as an undergraduate at the Coast Guard Academy.
“A classmate and I wanted to go to Germany over Christmas Break,” he said. “We were going from Munich to Salzberg, Austria. On Christmas Eve, we ended up in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s winter resort that had been taken over by the U.S. Army after the war. An Army base was there.
“My friend and I went to dinner at the Officers Club. Afterward, we decided to go to bed early since it was dark.
“At 11 o’clock, we started hearing gunfire. We did not know what the heck was going on.
“The base was in the mountains, and people had placed candles on the mountain side in the form of stars and other symbols.
“People were firing off guns that echoed across the Valley. We got dressed and followed a parade of people into the next town, where there was a Catholic church and they had Midnight Mass.
They had fresh-cut pine trees for Christmas trees. You could just smell them, pleasantly.
“At the end of the service, they sang Silent Night in German,” Mr. Clarke said. “This was on a clear, cold, crisp night, snow crunching on the ground.
“And the smell of the Christmas trees. The night gave a very lasting impression with me.”
