Where Decorating for Christmas Becomes a Pet Project

As his wife bustles around Ginger’s grave, clipping grass and waxing the marker to a glorious shine, Henry DeVries struggles to shove a waist-high white bedpost into the winter-hardened soil.

Then he starts to cry.

He apologizes -- it’s been two years, he says, maybe they shouldn’t still grieve so deeply for their beloved cocker spaniel.

He knows that not everyone mourns their animals’ passings so elaborately, burying them at a pet cemetery and making monthly pilgrimages to decorate the graves.

But as the Cerritos couple -- Henry, 79, and Sharon, 59 -- turn Ginger’s grave into a holiday wonderland complete with a tabletop Christmas tree, holiday garland and that post, hung with wooden cutouts of snowmen, they say there’s no other way they could have said goodbye to a pet they felt as close to as they do their children.

“She was part of the family,” Sharon said. “I couldn’t have just let the vet dispose of her when she passed. You wouldn’t do that to a child, and we couldn’t do that to Ginger.”

The monthly treks to the Sea Breeze Pet Cemetery in Huntington Beach can be shattering.

“It hurts every time, every time,” Henry DeVries repeated. “But you come out and it’s a little bit easier every month.”

For the owners of the nearly 10,000 animals buried at Sea Breeze, leaving departed pets at the veterinarian or digging a crude hole in the backyard is a woefully inadequate way to memorialize their loved ones.

“It gives people closure to have their pets here,” said owner Brenda Weaver. “They’re like family members, so their owners want to know where they are and that they’re OK.”

Most of the pets at the 3.5-acre cemetery are dogs and cats -- cats can be buried in a special section away from canines if they didn’t get along so well. There are also monkeys, birds, guinea pigs, a skunk and a pony, which fills a good-size rectangle of grass in the middle of the cemetery.

The grounds include a viewing room, cremation facilities and a woodshop to craft tiny caskets. For a typical cremation and burial, owners can expect to pay about $1,000.

During most of the year, the only decorations allowed on the graves are colorful silk flowers that create a rainbow effect across the grounds. But in December, in a concession to the holidays and the cold weather that lets the groundskeepers go a month without mowing, humans can decorate their pets’ graves any way they like.

For most owners, it seems what they like is rather elaborate and just what their pets would want to celebrate Christmas.

An army of tiny trees is fanned out across the lawn. Flags of snowmen and Santa sprout from the grass, and tinsel garlands hug dozens of the marble markers and all three statues of St. Francis.

The glitter cursive of pets’ names written on dozens of red stockings shimmer in the afternoon sun. Shiny pinwheels whir softly. It’s easy to ignore the traffic rushing down adjacent Beach Boulevard and simply enjoy the birds twittering in the trees.

Sometimes nurses from the hospital next door come to eat lunch on the benches scattered about the cemetery, Weaver said. But the facility and the peace it offers are meant for the owners, some of whom have been burying their pets there almost since the cemetery opened in 1961.

The Hannefields have seven pets -- six dogs and a cat named Kat -- at Sea Breeze. One group of dogs is stacked three deep. “They were so close when they were alive that it makes us feel better now that they’re still together,” said Natalie Hannefield, 85, of Long Beach.

This is the first year that she hasn’t been able to make it down to the memorial park to decorate the pets’ graves for Christmas. Her broken hip meant that her daughter had to put up the tiny, plastic-wrapped trees on her own.

Her first dog buried at Sea Breeze, a Scottie named Shadow, died in 1966. Taffi, a poodle; Muffy, a cockapoo; and Misty, a Lhasa apso, are in the same plot, about 20 feet from Shadow. Tabatha, a cocker spaniel, and Kat are in another grave 50 feet away.

Another little grave is waiting for whichever of the family’s three dogs goes next.

Everyone in the family adored their pets when they were alive, holding birthday parties for the dogs and taking holiday portraits of them under the Christmas tree. In death, the devotion is no less.

Family members try to visit the graves on each pet’s birthday in addition to the Christmas decorating trip, Hannefield said.

“You talk to them and it makes you feel better,” she said. “Maybe some people think we’re crazy or too sentimental. But we’re so attached to them. They were our kids, especially after our human kids had grown.”

The displays of affection are all around.

Annie, Binky, Winky, Sunshine, Snuffy, Moonshine -- “Taunton’s Little Family” says the granite marker -- have an array of holiday knickknacks on their marker. Stockings are fanned out around the grave with ceramic figurines of an angel and a train along with a reindeer snow globe.

The Baronis have buried “our babies,” Amber and Gidget, with space for a third. Their display, sheltered by a thin layer of plastic, includes clusters of miniature gifts, cotton tufts representing snow and a faded pink poodle squeak toy.

Decorating for Christmas provides Henry and Sharon DeVries solace.

“She would unwrap her presents with her teeth then take her little paws and open the presents for the people,” said Sharon DeVries, pausing while manicuring the grass around Ginger’s grave.

“We come here and make her plot beautiful for Christmas, and we feel we’re still in touch with her. There’s no way we could have recovered otherwise.”