Crab season has long been a joyous occasion in Sonoma County

Crab for Christmas: It seems to be as important a holiday tradition in this little corner of the world as candy canes and figgy pudding.

When availability is threatened, crab makes headlines. When the boats come in loaded, there is dancing on the docks (well, figuratively speaking). Local grocers stencil a path of crab images on the floor leading from door to fish counter.

Sea creatures so exalted cry out for a history of their own, don’t you think?

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First, this crab for Christmas business. It is not something handed down from our ancestors. The beginning of the commercial Dungeness crab fishery at Bodega Bay is not as long ago as you might believe - well within the memory of those with lucky lifetimes.

The Dungeness shares its name with a small fishing port in northern Washington State, as well as a namesake town in Scotland, where I doubt there are crabs to be captured. According to experts like Walter Dahlstrom and Paul Wild, of California’s Department of Fish and Game, authors of “A History of Dungeness Crab Fisheries in California,” there are serious populations of these beauties along our coast. They specifically mention the waters off Bodega Bay.

The authors put the start of the fishing industry in California in San Francisco around 1848, just prior to the gold rush, when a group of immigrant Southern Italian fishermen began harvesting local fish populations, catching crabs with the hoopnet or ringnet, contrivances with ancestors that undoubtedly date to the Native Americans and are still popular with sport fishermen.

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Before World War II - which is the way my generation dates everything - Humboldt Bay was pretty much the southern end of commercial crabbing.

There was a little crab stand in Field’s Landing (site of the last whaling station on this coast), which was a must-stop after shopping in Eureka.

I don’t remember what those beauties went for per pound, but I remember sharing the back seat with them on the 40-mile trip home to Redcrest, a long time to wait, not at all patiently, to crack that first claw.

Never mind that the Chevy coupe with a rumble seat that my brother left behind when he enlisted smelled like low tide for the next three days. The crab boats were in!

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World War II is also the way we can date the Bodega Bay crab fishery.

In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, the government tagged Bodega’s inner bay as a site of a “Port of Refuge” where military craft could anchor safely, even in the event of war.

Employees of Piombo Construction were at work on the jetty that would mark the entrance to the new port when the war began. A hurry-up dredging followed, creating new land at the north end of the inner bay and a navigable channel and turning basin - a safe anchorage.

Bodega Bay’s acknowledged historian, Glenice Carpenter, whose grandmother taught school at the bay and whose father, Harold Ames Sr., fished with the Coast Miwok Smith family as a young man, can recite fishing history front to back, as she did for a video history a decade or more ago.

Glenice took me through the early days of Coast Camp, a sport fishing destination that’s now the busy tourist spot known as The Tides. She talked about the fleet of Sicilian fishermen from San Francisco, who came before the jetty and the harbor, pulling their boats up on shore at the spot known then as Hog Gulch, where PG&E left us with the Hole-in-the-Head in the 1960s. They called themselves, inexplicably, “The Yukon Gang,” and helped turn this old fishing camp into a real - and rollicking - town.

She talked about the early years of the war and the sounds of big guns and the mysterious flashes of white light at sea beyond Bodega Head.

And, to our topic of the day, she talked about 1942 and ’43 when a group of fishing families from the area around Port Orford, Oregon, moved their boats and their residences to Bodega Bay to take advantage of the new safe harbor.

(One of them was the Carpenter family with a teenage son named Earl, who would marry Glenice and establish himself as the acknowledged “Captain” of the fishing fleet through the “glory years” of the 1950s and ’60s.)

Pertinent to our history, the newcomers brought crab pots, which were legal in Oregon and not yet in commercial use in California. But legality came quickly and the crab season soon proved a healthy addition to the fishermen’s incomes that were growing with the population of the Bay Area.

Crab became more accessible to all of us. You could buy it right off the boat, or at the Tides wharf. Very soon, it was in the town markets.

I can’t recall his name, but I remember buying fresh crab on the sidewalk in Montgomery Village from a fellow who brought a couple of dozen daily from the bay in a box affixed to his motor scooter. Not motorcycle. Motor scooter. I don’t remember what I paid per pound. And that’s just as well. The difference could cause weeping and gnashing of teeth.

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Farther back, long before the crab craze, it was the Smith family that, quite literally, invented the Bodega Bay fishery. They were, and still are, Native American descendants of Stephen Smith, the sea captain who was the grantee of the Bodega Rancho Mexican land grant in the 1840s. Smith fathered children with his “Indian Way” wife, a Coast Miwok woman who worked in the Smith household.

The Coast Miwok, of course, always fished the sea, but the Captain’s grandson, William Smith, took it a step further at the turn of the 20th century.

William lived with his family - five daughters, six sons - in a big house in the cypress trees at the top of the sandy isthmus half-circling the outer bay that we now know as Doran Park.

The late Young Smith, William’s grandson and a tribal elder, spoke of his family with great pride when I interviewed him in 2012.

This grandfather, he said, “didn’t read or write but he cut lumber and measured it with string” to build his American-style house and a 14-foot boat, powered by sail and oars, that was arguably the first commercial fishing boat to work out of the bay.

He and his sons harvested smelt and perch in abundance and peddled their catch from his truck and from a small fish market he rented for a time in Santa Rosa.

At the end of World War I, three of the older Smith brothers came home from the military and went off to Alaska to fish salmon for a season.

When they returned in 1919, according to the family story, they dumped enough $20 gold pieces in their mother’s apron to pay for not one, but two, diesel-powered boats. Built in a Marin boatyard, Smith #1 and #2 were the first drag boats in the bay.

These sturdy trawlers fished the coast from Fort Bragg to the Farallones, Young recalled, including a highly profitable herring run in Tomales Bay. They were the biggest boats in the bay for many years. (In that 2012 interview, Young said he had been told recently that the 93-year-old Smith #1 was still fishing out of Crescent City.)

The Smith Brothers contracted with Paladini, the San Francisco fish marketer, and built the first commercial wharf - now an events center known as the Bodega Bay Yacht Club.

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While it remains a closely guarded sport, the pursuit of abalone, the highly desirable mollusk that doesn’t move much in its lifetime but is strangely elusive, gets the same kind of public notice when the limits are lowered or the season shortened.

Before diving became popular in our cold ocean - that is to say, before the wetsuit - abalone was not only more plentiful but more accessible. Rock pickers waded out with a gunnysack and a tire iron to pry the abs - some beauties measuring 10-inches and more across (I have a family-trophy shell to prove this) - with only wet jeans and sneakers to show for the hunt.

Before there were divers driving in pre-dawn darkness from the Sacramento Valley and beyond, to dive in sometimes-dangerous conditions for their limit, there were the born-and-raised pickers, who had their own special secret places to find abs. At low tide, they barely got wet.

My old boss and friend Art Volkerts, who died last month just a couple of years short of 100, was one of these.

My late husband, who grew up on the Sonoma Coast, used to say that Art knew the abs by name and would watch them grow to legal size through the season until they made a decent family meal.

Now, too often, the perils of maintaining a healthy fishing industry on our coast become more frequent and the prices rise until our seafood, once the cheapest of dinners, becomes a luxury.

The Dungeness has become the No. 1 fundraiser for every lodge, service club and school this side of the Sierras. We honor it at the holidays, right up there with the Thanksgiving turkey and the Easter ham.

So you have to stand in line? Get over it. It’s a Christmas thing.

Dare I say, “Quit your crabbing!’?”?