Immigrants from Italy bonded throughout the K Street area neighborhoods in the late 1940s - now known as Tacoma Hilltop - with cultural traditions brought over with their families.  My father-in-law, Joe DeRosa, was part of one of those families.

"Oh we all roamed the area back then.  It was me, Joe Doria, John Messina, Joe Munizza, John Storino, Al Rettura and Ramo Natilizo.  The Schwab brothers, too, who were half-Italian.  The Kelly boys were not Italians but they were great kids and we never had any problems with them," he jokes as we chat over the phone.

You see, we chat over the phone because he's vacationing right now.  He's in Arizona golfing with his childhood buddies ... almost all of those same buddies he just mentioned.

These guys are life-long friends.  The kind of friends most people only dream of having.  They share history, memories, and from what Joe DeRosa tells me, lots and lots of tradition.

"Christmas was not about gifts when we were growing up.  It was about family and tradition," he tells me. "We got gifts of clothing, belts and shoes. Our stockings were filled with fruit and sometimes some nuts, but we were happy with that. The best part of Christmas was the food."

Tradition holds value when eating like an Italian at Christmastime in the 1940s.   Aunts and mothers spent two days making Italian cookies such as Scalili, Turdili and Cinalili, which were variations of hard cookies dipped and glazed with honey.

"They were so hard they lasted until Easter," Joe chuckles. "But they were good, and I wish we still made them for Christmas."

The big night was Christmas Eve. That's when they'd eat Baccala, an Italian dish made by soaking dried cod for a week and then cooking it in tomato sauce.  My husband, Damon, tells me his dad tried to make it one year recently and the aunts and uncles were the only ones who ate it.  Can't say I would've eaten it either.

After gorging on a vast amount of this Italian delicacy, playing with cousins and opening up the few gifts they had, midnight mass at St. Rita's on S. 14th and Ainsworth was in order.

"We'd walk home from midnight mass, then eat and party some more until the early morning hours," my father-in-law reminisces. "On Christmas Day we'd celebrate with friends and family some more.  We'd eat lupini, which was a bean soaked in salt water for a few days to soften up.  We'd sit around the table, snap the hard shells, talk, eat beans and drink wine."

I ask him what traditions he'd like to see brought back to the family.  I figure he'll want the hard, tasteless scalili cookies or possibly the re-constituted fish meat known as Baccala. 

But no, he doesn't care about that. 

 "I wouldn't want any tradition back because we still all get together as family and friends- and that's all that matters," he says.