WILMINGTON, Del. — President Biden on Saturday visited a strip mall a few miles from his house, walking near a jewelry shop, dipping into stores that offer luxury outerwear, and browsing the aisles of menswear store Jos. A. Bank before emerging with a bag in hand. It was the kind of preholiday weekend days that most Americans can relate to — a festive morning of shopping.
About 24 hours later, Biden arrived at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Church for a memorial Mass and a day tinged with more than a little tragedy. It was 50 years ago on Sunday that Biden’s wife Neilia and 1-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident as they were out shopping for a Christmas tree.
The two events over two days were a reminder of how this time of year contains a mix of emotions for Biden and his large family, one that is marked with the somber and the celebratory. It is about bonding and being together. But it is also about remembering those who have been lost.
As Biden went into the memorial mass and emerged from the church, he was surrounded by his family. Those with him included his son Hunter — the only person in that 1972 car crash who is still living. Hunter and his brother, Beau, emerged from that crash injured and tightly bonded together, until the day Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, another tragedy in a family that has known plenty of them.
The crash, Hunter has written, is one of his earliest memories and most consequential of his life.
When Joe Biden was growing up, his family had a tradition of waiting until Christmas Eve to put up the tree. His father would make a mixture of Ivory Snow detergent and water, layering the tree to make it look like fresh-fallen snow.
“The point was to produce the maximum possible sensory overload on Christmas morning when the kids came downstairs to see what Santa had done overnight,” his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, wrote in a recent book.
It was Biden’s election to the Senate in 1972 that started to alter that tradition. His young family of five was planning to relocate for his new job in Washington and their lives were hectic enough that Neilia wanted to get the tree a week earlier than usual. They were about four miles from home, after picking out a large tree at a farm, when the accident occurred.
Biden that day was in Washington, the newly elected senator making arrangements for his new office and staff when the phone call came urging him to return home because something terrible had happened.
His wife and daughter were killed, his two surviving boys at the hospital, Beau with a broken leg and Hunter with a fractured skull.
After the crash, Biden’s brother Jimmy went to a nearby department store and, despite being told it wasn’t for sale, bought an artificial tree decorated in tinsel. He returned to the hospital and, despite being told it wasn’t allowed, pushed it through the revolving door and brought it into the hospital room of his nephews, according to an account in Owens’s book.
“That is how Hunter and Beau wound up with a fully decorated, department store Christmas tree lighting up their hospital room,” she wrote. “It was the only source of light at that time.”
For a family with plenty of traditions, a new one emerged for this time of year.
Biden’s immediate family would now gather on Dec. 18 to remember the day of the crash. They would attend Mass at the nearby church, as they did on Sunday, and often head afterward to the house for coffee and bagels. A wreath with white flowers would be laid at the gravesites.
This Sunday, the family members with Biden also included first lady Jill Biden, whom he married about five years after the car crash and who tried to help repair a shattered family, and their daughter, Ashley.
They also included his grandchildren, among them Beau’s son Hunter and Hunter’s son Beau. Two of the grandchildren carried large green wreaths with white flowers, preparing to place them at the gravesites.
A family devastated by returning home with a Christmas tree now remembers by placing an evergreen wreath on a grave. Where the family was altered by tragedy, a larger family now gathers.
While Hunter and Beau spent that Christmas some 50 years ago in a hospital room — one lit by their uncle’s contraband tree — the family now tries to gather for a Christmas Eve dinner, one that this year will likely be spent at the White House.
In the early years, Hunter has said, those gatherings seemed designed mostly to help two boys heal from unimaginable tragedy.
“I grew up watching, without always fully appreciating, my entire family perform the most selfless deeds on our behalf, without any real benefit to themselves,” Hunter wrote in his memoir. “Everyone took a turn as a hero in our story; everyone performed a kind of magic act.”
Biden remains a proud Irish American and a professed respecter of fate, but insists he is still an optimist. “My dad,” Hunter wrote, “understood something rare, something truly genius: trauma gave us the gift of each other.”