Christmas when Nellie Richetta was growing up was not exactly the kind that the Ingalls had in “Little House on a Prairie.” Some elements of it were there though.
“It wasn’t like Christmases today,” octogenarian Richetta said of her family’s Christmas celebrations when she was young. No big parties, gatherings around a tree heavy-laden with twinkling ornaments and mounds of wrapped gifts underneath the evergreen fronds, singing Noel and decking the halls with boughs of holly, as she and husband Leo have today with their successful children and grandchildren.
Oh, they did have a tree – a modest one and nothing quite ostentatious – and they hung their stockings as tradition still dictates today, Richetta recalled.
But instead of electronic and digital toys and modern gizmos bulging in today’s elaborately decorated Santa socks, “We got mostly walnuts and oranges, a little bit of candy – we didn’t have a lot of candy,” Richetta remembered.
The walnuts came from the trees in their 20-acre property which was planted with trees that supplied their dining tables – oranges, peaches, apricots, among others.
It was a celebration dictated by the realities of life back then before the dark days of the Great Recession and the horrifying World War II, when basic needs and must-haves took a front seat over luxuries that people could do without. Everybody worked for livelihood, not to be relieved from boredom.
Like every adult in her childhood neighborhood, both her parents worked – in the fields, orchards, and for some later on, in the Manteca Cannery, like her mother did at one time. On top of that paying job which augmented their meager family coffers, the women in the neighborhood did all the domestic chores – washing and ironing clothes, cooking, cleaning the house, feeding the animals and chickens which were all raised for their dining tables.
What was most important though, and the most memorable aspect of those early days of Christmas in Richetta’s young life, was the family getting together to share a meal and just sharing the joys of the day with one another, albeit not one where the majority of the activity involved unwrapping of gifts and playing with the new toys all day.
Richetta was recalling days of yore, when Manteca was a bucolic and rustic sandy plain populated by a sprinkling of souls compared to the 73,000 that call the Family City home today.
Those were the days when the kids in her neighborhood did not have 10 or 15 cents to go to the movies at a whim. That field trip to El Rey Theater in the central part of town was reserved for Saturday or Sunday, a special treat.
Those were the days when someone could build a two-bedroom home with a basement for just $2,000 as Richetta’s father did for his wife and their growing number of children. Richetta was 10 years old and the oldest of what would become a brood of five.
Compared to the tank house in her paternal grandmother’s home where Richetta and her parents lived before that, the new two-bedroom house felt like a mansion. The tank-house room where they slept before moving to the new house was directly underneath the water tank, making it hard to sleep at night because of the noise from the water pump. Above that, where the noise was coming from, was the windmill which pumped the water up to the water tank. The water tank had to be high enough because the water pressure was what delivered the water for usage.
Previously, the tank house was her father’s bedroom before he got married.
And then again, Richetta was talking about a unique community that wasn’t like any other during that time and even today. She was remembering the Russian Colony in the northeast corner of Manteca’s sphere-of-influence area where everybody made their home in the quiet, rustic and rural enclave. It’s a community that has since been covered by the sands of time, now existing mainly in the memories of Richetta and her husband Leo.
