Home Away From Home : Celebration in a Park

Chestnuts roasting on an open flame do it for some people. But for Isaac Urquidi, it’s the scent of roasting pine nuts that takes him back to Christmases past.

Half Mescalero Apache and half Basque, Urquidi’s family celebrated the season as a Christian holiday and in traditional Indian fashion.

It was the family’s Apache roots that led them each year to a river bank lined with cottonwoods near the small eastern Arizona mining town in which they lived.

There, they and other Apache families celebrated winter ceremony, with traditional “give-away” gift exchanges, prayers to Mother Earth and the cooking of tamales, meats, chilies, corn tortillas, corn soups and pine nuts on an open fire.

“The smell of pine nuts, even to this day--even thinking about it right now--reaches my senses, and I feel a little bit homesick,” said Urquidi, a social worker with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.

Jane Cazabat, a Creek Seminole from Oklahoma, was raised a Methodist, but her parents also passed on traditional Indian ways. Now she works as a banking automation consultant, and she too encounters a nostalgia of blended traditions this time of year.

Like many American Indians from distant cultures who live in this polyglot megalopolis, Cazabat and Urquidi will counter their homesickness by joining up to 5,000 other Indians in Bell Garden’s Ford Park on Saturday for the fifth annual Childrens’ Christmas Party.

The party is dedicated to children of the Indian community, and includes such non-Indian touches as Santa Claus and elves. Afterward, the adults will throw themselves a pow wow with traditional dancing and food. For Cazabat, the highlight is conversing with people in her Creek language. “It’s like taking a quick trip home,” she said.