Shootout at the Christmas Village

You would think that Christmas trees in cemeteries would be a depressing sight. Well, compared to other goings on about town this season, a decorated Christmas tree on a grave seems like a breath of fresh air. 

“Shootout at the Christmas Village” would sound funnier if it wasn’t true. Unfortunately, there really was a shooting in the crowded Christmas Village across from Philadelphia’s City Hall two weeks before Christmas this year. A fourteen-year-old boy is in critical condition, shot in the face. Two other boys, fifteen and fourteen, shot in the calf and leg. Two fourteen-year-old male suspects were taken into custody. Seems this was a fight that escalated to gunfire. Festive, right? So, if you plan on taking in some ice skating at the holiday rink at Dilworth Plaza this year, consider wearing a Kevlar jacket instead of that fashionable down vest.

Happy Christmas, everyone. That same weekend, two dozen people were shot and four died in a series of eleven shootings from Center City to Germantown to Northeast Philadelphia. The mayor went on the news saying this was a one-off, and despite it being a particularly violent weekend, Philadelphia really is safe.

Fast forward to the morning of December 17, when I picked up a package from my neighbor’s doorstep. Porch pirates steal packages in my neighborhood. Neighbors look out for each other and grab boxes and envelopes from each other’s front steps before thieves can get them. We text each other to let the recipient know their package is safe. After I texted my neighbors, they thanked me and said when they came home the previous night, they found someone’s Christmas gifts ripped open on their front steps. Children’s books and a game in a torn open box from an address several blocks away. Children’s books and games have little or no street value. 

So just when it all seemed too much to bear - no más, por favor, as the Spanish say - I heard on the radio (B101), a caller describing an “angel tree.” The radio station invited people to call in and describe their Christmas trees. In the mix of callers describing bright, gaudy, vintage, and all other type trees, one woman said her mother used to keep an “angel tree.” This was a smaller tree in the living room alongside the regular, full-sized decorated tree. The angel tree had an ornament for each family member who had died. 

What a way to honor and remember! I assume each angel ornament bore the name of the deceased. Any new angels were added for people who had died in the year just passed. A lovely way to honor and to CONTINUE to remember their loved ones! I’ve already put myself in a better mood and forgotten about the shootout at the Christmas Village.

Why do Christmas trees stir up memories? And why a tree, anyway?  Why not a hay bale or a life-sized Jesus cutout? I recently heard that chopping down a tree and setting it back up in your living room symbolizes Christ being raised from the dead. Real or artificial, the tree tends to bring back memories of Christmas past, and people past. This may be partly why people set up Christmas trees in cemeteries, and even have Christmas trees engraved on their headstones!

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In those cemeteries that allow Christmas trees at gravesites, I am always intrigued that people go to so much trouble to set them up. Some are six feet high and some even have solar-powered lights. Usually they have ornaments, typical shiny balls or maybe photos of the deceased with their family. Some are small and more manageable. John Waters, the film maker, famously sets up a decorated Christmas tree at the actor Divine’s grave every Christmas (Prospect Hill Cemetery, Towson, Maryland) - simply because his friend enjoyed Christmas so much when he was alive. If you want to join in that celebration, you can always top your tree with a Divine Christmas tree topper, as shown here. Unless you’re an atheist. Atheists have no holidays.

So while it is easy to be pessimistic about Christmas when there’s a shootout at the Christmas Village and thieves are ripping apart your Christmas presents, a Christmas tree in a cemetery can provide hope, or at least a distraction. Maybe setting up a small angel tree to memorialize the departed would make perfect sense at this time in your life.

And if you’re lucky enough to be near a cemetery that stays unlocked at night, drive toward that light in the distance – it may be an illuminated Christmas tree. Like violence, Christmas and cemeteries will always be with us. Maybe they balance each other out. As Emerson, Lake, and Palmer sang in their song, Karn Evil 9:

“Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, we’re so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside.” 

References and Further Reading:

https://www.fox29.com/news/christmas-village-shooting-dilworth-plaza

https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/philadelphia-gun-violence-mayor-cherelle-parker/

Cemeteries as Roadside Attractions

South Jersey (especially along Route 9) is unparalleled for roadside attractions. Giant fiberglass cartoon figures, fanciful soft serve ice cream stands, diners, pyramids made of hubcaps, the list goes on. The list now, for me, includes small, pocket-sized cemeteries, like the one above, along Route 9 in Cape May Court House, New Jersey. 

In the summer of 2024, I was researching forgotten cemeteries for my book, “Abandoned Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs” (expected publication in late 2025, on Fonthill). South Jersey, being in the general area of Philly, was on my radar. I happened to be in Cape May, so why not check out the local cemeteries? 

On my drive back north to Philly on Route 9, I noticed some small burial grounds pop up on my phone map. They were right along the highway. I stopped at two of them, plots of land about twenty feet wide, and fifteen feet deep, with maybe as many as ten old headstones standing at attention. The grounds were well taken care of.

Robert Morris in Holmes Family Cemetery

No doubt, these were family plots that had been on private property at one time. A few such burial grounds still exist in Philadelphia, e.g. the DeBenneville (est. 1758) and Vandegrift (est. 1775) cemeteries on North Broad Street and Bristol Pike, respectively, but New Jersey has many more. Why? Certainly south Jersey is more rural, but there must be other reasons why most private family cemeteries in Philadelphia were moved or built over. Chances are that heavy industrialization and rapid population growth in Philadelphia in the mid to late 1800s contributed to the eradication of small family cemeteries.

One of the topics I cover in my book is the disappearance of such small family burial grounds. Large farms and estates dwindled in size as parcels of land were sold off throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. These family burial grounds either disappeared, were built over, or the graves were moved. Some still exist, providing us with interesting slices of history. 

Holmes Family Cemetery along Route 9, Cape May Court House, NJ

A cemetery I stopped at on Route 9 in Cape May Court House (that’s the name of the actual town) was a place that my cellphone map app called the Holmes Family Cemetery. Most of the gravestones had a death date in the early 1800s. Someone had placed small American flags on the veterans’ stones, men who had fought in the Revolutionary War. But wait, there was no Battle of Cape May, right? According to the book, Cape May County Story (Avalon Publishing, 1975) by Boyer and Cunningham:

“New Jersey became the foremost state in resisting British tyranny in January of 1775 when the Assembly voted to present grievances to the King. Jonathan Hand and Eli Elrdidge represented Cape May County at that meeting. No colony was more deeply involved in the Revolution than New Jersey. It was a natural passageway between New York and Philadelphia and was always in a condition of siege. Benjamin Franklin likened it to a barrel, open at both ends. It had been called the “Corridor State” and the “Cockpit of the Revolution” by some, and others referred to this state as the “Pathway to Freedom.”

American men who fought in the famous New Jersey battles of Monmouth, Trenton, Red Bank, and Princeton, had to come from somewhere. Many came from south Jersey, some of whom are probably buried in the Holmes Family Burial Ground. Excluding Quakers (conscientious objectors) and Tories (loyal to the King), the above noted historians tell us that “49 percent of the male population in the state bore arms and New Jersey contributed one eighth of the total men from all the colonies that fought in the war.”

The Holmes Family Cemetery was distinctive in that every headstone had daddy-long-legs spiders on them! Odd. What was even odder was all the other types of spiders dangling from the pine trees on web strands above my head. 

About a mile up the road was a rather peculiar small cemetery in that it appeared to be in someone’s front yard. Curious, I parked across the busy street and walked up to the house, which had a pickup truck parked in the driveway. I knocked on the door. A man about 45 years old appeared. I told him I was researching a book on abandoned cemeteries and asked if he knew the story behind the gravestones in his front yard. My cellphone app called this the Hand Family Burial Ground. Perhaps the Jonathan Hand (1728 – 1789) mentioned in the passage above was a member of this family, and may be resting below one of the nameless, worn stones in this plot.          

The homeowner asked me to wait while he put his shoes on. He came outside carrying a paperback book. He told me that when he bought the house about twenty years ago, it was explained to him that he did not own that small portion of land in his front yard. It was owned by the state of New Jersey. When Route 9, a state-owned highway, was built, all the small burial grounds along it were purchased by the state. The state maintains them. 

Roadside view of Craig's property, Hand Family Cemetery in foreground

Craig's front yard looking toward Route 9, with Hand Family Cemetery near road

The owner, Craig, told me a rather comical story. He said that shortly after he bought the house, he woke up one morning to a lot of activity near the street. Cars were pulling up, people getting out and gathering in the cemetery. Suddenly, shots rang out and he hit the deck! He peeked through one of his windows and realized that a twenty-one gun salute had just occurred. It was Memorial Day and people were placing flags on the graves!

As I thanked him and was turning to leave, he held out the paperback as a gift. He said “My mother was a historian and co-authored this book. You can have it.” The book is called Cape May County Story, the very book I quoted above. And yes, it does mention cemeteries. 

Sarah Somers (1770 - 1796)

It is interesting to see familiar surnames on the stones in these old cemeteries. Sarah Somers (1770 - 1796) and Sarah Hand (1741 – 1826), both buried in the Hand plot, each have surnames that should be familiar to beachgoers who frequent the Jersey shore. Sarah Somers and her husband, Constant Somers, may be related in some way to nearby Somers Point, a south Jersey beach town. Sarah Hand along with her husband Jesse Hand, Esq., may have been related to the still current and popular shore business, Hand’s Department Store on Jersey's Long Beach Island.

Sarah Hand (1741 – 1826)

The two small cemeteries I stopped at had been private family burial grounds at the edges of farms. As the farms were diced up and sold as small packets of land for development as residential properties, the burial grounds were kept intact. There is another small cemetery on the grounds of the Cape May Zoo, but I could not find that one. They may all have been forgotten by the public, as they are hidden in plain sight, but they have, thankfully, been saved from oblivion by the state of New Jersey. They may not be as eye-catching as a giant fiberglass cow, but they will outlast most of Jersey's other roadside attractions.

Cemeteries Are Not So Depressing

What is depressing is watching a Thanksgiving Day parade in the rain. Like the one that happened in Philadelphia this year, 2024, and in NYC, to the multi-million-dollar Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – Jimmy Fallon’s big smile notwithstanding. I wasn’t even there, I was just watching on television. Depressing watching those people trying to have a good time. I’ve had more fun attending funerals in the rain. 

It's easy for me, a cemetery creeper, to say that, if you’re depressed, go visit a cemetery! Sometimes the world is too much world us, as Wordsworth wrote. Whether it’s during a busy day at work or I’m sitting in my car in the supermarket parking lot watching rats running under a dumpster, I sometimes long to get away – to a cemetery. Quiet and ratless solitude. 

I’ve long felt that there is beauty in the forgotten world of these memory gardens. The absence of distraction allows me to focus, sometimes on nothing in particular. I have fleeting memories of live people whom I’ve met over the years, but I can remember exactly where I made a particular cemetery photograph twenty years ago. I also know that most of my cemetery visits have been fun, and all have been therapeutic. They can be a cushion against the outside world. And those cemetery fences...? 

Originally meant to keep the thoughts of the dead away from those of the living, one can also interpret cemetery fences as demarcations, boundaries of a memory world in which hope and solace reside. Cemeteries can sometimes be more than a cushion for us to relax on, they can be a trampoline for our emotions, our creativity – maybe even our sanity. A private place that most people avoid - in our midst but a world away.

Victoria Wyeth, in her Halloween, 2024, lecture on her family’s artwork (virtual gallery talk sponsored by the Brandywine River Museum in Chaddsford, PA), said that after her grandfather Andrew Wyeth died, she was depressed for months. It was only after her Uncle Jamie flew her to Maine to picnic at her grandfather’s grave, did she experience the calm joy of being in a cemetery.

Victoria and her Uncle Andy (who died in 2009) had been very close, she being his only grandchild. A few months after his death, Jamie Wyeth flew her to Maine where he and Victoria’s Dad took her to the cemetery where Andy was buried. They had a picnic. She said they “turned the cemetery into something that’s not scary.”  Now, whenever she’s sad or something cool happens, she visits the cemetery and talks with her grandfather. She loves that her Dad and Uncle took a situation like that, brought her to a cemetery and made it normal. She went on to say that this interaction with cemeteries is really important, something people tend to avoid.

I used to think that visiting and volunteering to do work in cemeteries was all about respect – respect for the past, and ultimately, respect for ourselves. I now think that respect ties in deeply with memory. Cemeteries are full of memories - maybe not ours, but we can still appreciate them. I volunteer at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia. I’ve witnessed people visiting from a thousand miles away, scooting in a motorized wheelchair up a sidewalk cleared by the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, Inc., to visit a grandparent who had died forty years earlier. Witnessing other people’s experience with memory can create a profound impression, a not depressing memory.

When I wrote my new book, Abandoned Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs (due out in 2025 on Fonthill Media), I mention a quote by my friend Ross Mitchell, who at the time I interviewed him in 2006, was the Executive Director of Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. I was speaking with him about ways in which an historic cemetery can stay in business (because that’s what cemeteries are, businesses - when they’re full, and can have no new burials, there is no income). 

Laurel Hill, like many cemeteries, hosts events. Sometimes admission is charged, usually donations are requested. Laurel Hill has hosted rock concerts, movie nights, historic tours, running events, classic hearse shows - all to engage the community and create positive memories for the attendees. Such events raise money for the upkeep of the grounds. I asked Ross how he came to terms with people thinking that fund-raising events in a cemetery was disrespectful, an impingement on peoples’ memories. He said: 

“People really need to come here and see Laurel Hill for themselves. They need to overcome their inhibition of ‘why would I want to visit a cemetery’ and realize that not all cemeteries are very depressing places. In fact I think this one is really a celebration of life. And you talk about, well, isn’t it disrespectful? If you look at the monuments and the sculpture in Laurel Hill you know these people wanted these monuments to be seen.”

There are many reasons to visit a cemetery, you don’t need to be visiting someone who died. There is history, art, architecture - and everything in a cemetery changes with the seasons of the year; things look different whenever you visit. You will witness the embodiment of other peoples’ memories and will come away with your own. While its true that during a brief visit we only get a fleeting glimpse of other peoples’ lives, but this can be enough. 

My friend George Hofmann, in his article, Bipolar Disorder and Memory writes about his memory as he gets older (George actually works in a cemetery) - “Instead of some deep resonance I’m lost in wavering impressions. Impressions can be beautiful. Beauty comes more readily in a forgotten world.” 

In the same article, Hofmann mentions a line from the movie, Nomadland, in which the central character states, “What’s remembered lives.” I have all good memories of cemeteries, even the one where I attended the burial of a friend’s nine-year-old son. Although that day was traumatic, the memory was modified years later, when the Dad took over the care of this cemetery - the prior owner could no longer manage it. So this Thanksgiving season, there are things to be thankful for, like memories. And come to think of it, I’ll bet all those people standing in the rain at this year’s Thanksgiving Day parades came away with good memories.

The last question Victoria Wyeth asked her grandfather before he died, was about how to create the color black. He said that he didn’t start by squeezing inky paint from a tube. “You build in the excitement before adding black, you slowly build it up with blues and reds and greens.” So let’s all make sure that when our screens go black, our lives will remain a colorful memory for those we leave behind - full of blues and reds and greens. When they visit your grave, let them leave with a smile - even if they don't know who you are.

REFERENCES:

Why The Cemetery Is a Celebration of Life:

https://www.stoneangels.net/ross-mitchell-part-8-visiting-laurel-hill-why-the-cemetery-is-a-celebration-of-life/

Virtual Gallery Talk with Victoria Wyeth: Halloween Edition 2024:

https://www.brandywine.org/museum/events/virtual-gallery-talk-victoria-wyeth-halloween-edition-2024-0

America’s First Family of Art:

https://pinestrawmag.com/americas-first-family-of-art/