Blended families in Sonoma County navigate holiday celebrations

The cardboard box that arrived at Shelley Shepherd-Klaner’s doorstep in December of 1991 wasn’t elegantly wrapped or adorned with a bow, but what was inside was a gift nonetheless.

Her mother had sent Shepherd-Klaner a batch of Hungarian Kifli cookies, a traditional cream cheese pastry that’s topped with powdered sugar. It resembled the ones Shepherd-Klaner’s grandmother, who had since passed, used to make during the holidays.

Missing the tight-knit Hungarian family she grew up with back in Ohio, Shepherd-Klaner, who was in Novato at the time, fell on the floor and burst into tears, she said.

“It just broke my heart,” Shepherd-Klaner said. “It was so hard to fly home at Christmas. I had my daughter, my job and there was so much going on.”

The moment served as a catalyst for Shepherd-Klaner to learn more about the Hungarian dishes she grew up with, ranging from the Kifli cookies to Hungarian cucumber salad, ones that are now at the heart of her Christmas Day celebrations at her Petaluma home.

Her husband, who she described as being “German, Irish, English and who knows what else” fully supports the shift away from the traditional American Christmas dishes, she said.

“It’s really made me appreciate my heritage,” Shepherd-Klaner said. “I was surrounded with it before, now I have to create it.”

She and her husband are among the many Sonoma County families who are blended, either by nationality, ethnicity, religion or race, and who navigate what the holidays look, taste and feel like to them.

According to 2020 U.S. Census data, the number of individuals who identify as multiracial jumped to 33.8 million last year, a 276% increase compared to 2010 figures.

In addition, roughly one in five U.S. adults were raised in interfaith families, with millennials having a higher probability of having parents from different religious backgrounds, the Pew Research Center found in 2016.

Some, like Shepherd-Klaner and her husband, have gone all-in on one partner’s holiday traditions, ones they share with people around them.

Others are like Petaluma resident Milagros Ott and her husband, Erik, a Peruvian and Danish-American couple who have learned how to fuse each other’s celebrations, while still passing on important cultural customs to their three children.

“We brought the best of both words into our traditions, plus our own,” Milagros Ott said.

For Sonoma County’s Chief Deputy Public Defender Jeff Mitchell and his wife Veena Mitchell, senior counsel at the international law firm Clyde & Co., melding each other’s cultures has been a vital part of their family since they were first married.

Veena was raised in the East Bay by Hindu parents from East India, while Jeff’s family is Christian and from Long Beach. They married in dual ceremonies, one at a Christian church and another at a Hindu temple, about 25 years ago, they said.

“That started our tradition of doing both,” Jeff Mitchell said.

The early years of their relationship, they added, meant getting accustomed to each other’s holiday celebrations, whether it meant Jeff trying traditional Indian dishes that he was unfamiliar with or Veena spending the Christmas holidays with her husband’s family, an experience she never had growing up in her Hindu family.

The birth of their now 11-year-old daughter added an extra reason to celebrate both of the couple’s holiday traditions, her East Indian background in particular, which is not as prominently portrayed in the United States, Veena said.

In practice, that meant serving chicken curry and other traditional East Indian dishes along with Thanksgiving dinner, as well as adorning the family’s Christmas tree with ornaments made in India, which the Mitchells have acquired over the years during their trips there.

Diwali, known as a festival of lights, and Holi, which is referred to as the festival of colors, are some of the Hindu celebrations that the family also celebrates.

“I think we’ve become more purposeful in adding the East Indian touches to … serve as a reminder to our daughter about the extraordinary half of her that makes up our family and makes up her,” Veena said.

Unlike the Mitchells, the Otts both grew up celebrating Christmas, though their mixed nationalities meant there were differences in how each observed the holiday.

Christmas celebrations for Milagros, who is from Peru, consisted of hot cocoa, dome-shaped panetón bread and turkey with applesauce, a traditional Christmas dish in her native country. Her Catholic family kicked off the festivities with Christmas Eve Mass followed by a 9 p.m. dinner. They waited until midnight to open presents, she said.

Erik and his family tried to emulate her version of the holiday the year after the couple married, when Milagros spent her first Christmas in the United States.

Her first trip to Denmark the following year, however, led to the beginning of the pair’s blended Christmas celebration, Milagros said.

There, she learned about smørrebrød, which are open-face sandwiches typically eaten before Christmas dinner; glögg, a spiced drink typically made with mulled wine and decorated with the paper hearts that are hung on the Christmas trees in the country.

“I loved it, it was just amazing,” she said.

Now, the Otts have developed their own mix of the holiday traditions. They cut out turkey on Christmas after Ott told her husband she didn’t want to have the dish again so soon after Thanksgiving. Instead, they have ossobuco, a dish made with braised veal shanks, and make sure to serve panetón. Her husband is in charge of making the glögg, Ott said.

Extended relatives from both sides of the family are invited to their Petaluma home to celebrate together, she added.

The blend of their Peruvian, Danish and American backgrounds is also represented on the family’s Christmas tree, which is decorated with ornaments that include the Danish paper hearts, as well as miniature llamas and Sonoma County wine bottles.

“It’s a whole mix of what we are, that Christmas tree,” Ott said.

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @nashellytweets

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Veena Mitchell’s name. A previous version of this story had an incorrect spelling.