Traditions

I read with great interest Barbie Ludovise's article regarding the virtual disappearance of stirrup socks from baseball ("Annnnd They're Out!" May 30). This particular fashion trend has been a source of great irritation to me since it began a few seasons ago. As an avid baseball fan for 40 years, I take the traditions of the game very seriously. Today's players who wear their baseball pants as one would wear sweat pants are turning their backs on the traditions of the game. I have a theory that they are making more than just a fashion statement when they take the field dressed the way they are. In this age of talent-diluting expansion and runaway salaries, the players are attempting to distance themselves from their hard-playing, highly talented, low-paid predecessors.

Last week, you printed a letter from Chris Wing, who wanted the "alumni, students, fan and supporters to put the athletic department (at USC) back in the hands of the people who built the tradition, SC people." In other words, he wants to go back to a system that had the coaches making 25 visits to a recruit when only two are allowed. To promise and give them thousands of dollars in scalped ticket money every game day. To admit them through the athletic department instead of the admissions department.

Javier is a proud man, a painter. Through broken English, I learned that he is from the Mexican state of Michoacan; he has a home in the city of Zamora. Fifteen years ago Javier made the trek north to California, ending up in an Orange County community with others from Michoacan. Like Javier, they came intending to provide a better life for their families left behind.

Holding candles and singing in Spanish, about 350 Christmas carolers on Wednesday staged the city's third annual Las Posadas, a traditional depiction of Mary and Joseph's search for shelter on the eve of Jesus' birth. Child actors portraying Mary and Joseph and the carolers knocked on the doors of four homes seeking shelter. "En el nombre del cielo, yo os pido posada (In the name of heaven, I ask for shelter)," the group sang at one home. "Aqui no es meson.

Christmas to the Atry family is about history. Forty-year-old handmade stockings, the faded set of place mats Grandma made from Christmas cards one year, a worn-out Advent calendar with a stuffed mouse to count down the days until Dec. 25. Countless holiday heirlooms and just as many fond family memories of past holidays bring Christmas to the house Jim and Criss Atry have called home for 20 years. "It wouldn't feel right without those things," Criss Atry said.

In the high table land, a small, rawboned woman picks her way across ash and sand to a cave where she slept as a girl when her family came to harvest pine nuts every August. Teodora Cuero is 90 years old, half-blind behind her sunglasses, with skin like crinkled wax paper. She moves her fingers over the lichen-mottled rock, and the memories flood her with emotion. She talks of lost friends and family members, how they used to live. Her friend Mike Wilken, an anthropologist, listens with rapt attention.

In New York, they frolic in the freezing surf off Coney Island. In Minnesota, they dive through holes cut into arctic lakes. In South Laguna, it's a different story when members of the local Polar Bear Club take their traditional New Year's Day dip. "We had to throw some ice in there to cool it down," said Dan Prinzing, one of the "polar bears" who went swimming while most people were snoozing Wednesday.

The first year the Adaya family prayed at home every night during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, they considered closing the drapes. The window that faced the street made it possible for passersby to see the family bowing, kneeling, pressing their foreheads to the floor, the women wearing head scarves and long dresses.

Do you ever get so bored during winter break that you actually find yourself wishing you were back in school? Do you succumb, year after year, to the winter blues? Here's a sampling of things to do and places to go that can help make the holiday break merrier and get you into the spirit of the season. Ice-Skating Ice-skating is a true winter activity. There are several ice-skating arenas in the area. Public sessions run about $8 with skate rentals, but prices vary.

When teachers Teri Duarte Rocco, Alice Rumbaugh and Sylvia Mora Krenzien asked several hundred junior high students who among them was Hispanic, only a few youngsters in the largely Hispanic assembly raised their hands. Those who did looked uncertain and embarrassed. "It's like they didn't want anyone to know," Rocco recalls.