HOLIDAYS : A World of Celebrations : Families across the San Fernando Valley keep ancient traditions and observances alive.

“He’s a Hanukkah,” 6-year-old Shannon Davies of Burbank says whenever she introduces one of her neigh borhood playmates, Motey Refael.

“We’ve explained to the kids that Motey doesn’t celebrate Christmas and that they have other holidays, like Hanukkah,” says Shannon’s mother, Shelley Davies.

Indeed, the list of ethnic holidays--both holy and secular--runs long in December and January. Some highlights, excluding Christmas and New Year’s Eve:

* Dec. 6 is St. Nicholas Day. Europeans venerate Nicholas, a 4th-Century bishop in Asia Minor who helped children and served as a precursor to the Santa we know today.

* At an annual festival usually held Dec. 9, Eskimos give thanks for the animals they kill for food.

* Dec. 13, Scandinavian girls dressed in long white gowns sing carols in homage to their beloved St. Lucia.

* Dec. 16 finds many Mexicans in the streets celebrating las posadas , the re-enactment of Joseph and Mary’s search for lodging in Bethlehem.

* Jews light the first candle in their eight-day ritual of Hanukkah beginning Dec. 19 this year.

* Right after Christmas, Japanese-Americans mail New Year’s Day cards to family and friends.

* Many Canadians and Britons observe Boxing Day on Dec. 26 and give gifts--in small boxes--to people who work for them, such as the paper deliverer or household help.

* Armenians celebrate Christmas on Jan. 6, which is believed to be the date of Jesus’ birth. Some Christian denominations commemorate the baptism of Christ on this day, while others celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany marking the visitation of the Christ Child by the Three Wise Men.

* Hindus celebrate harvest day, or pongol, every year. In 1993, the Hindus’ day of thanksgiving falls on Jan. 14.

Some of these holidays and observances started centuries ago in foreign lands and have made their way to the United States. The traditions that surround them are practiced in the homes of immigrants, their children and grandchildren. Those traditions make for a more varied and interesting holiday season in the San Fernando Valley and throughout the Southland--and in some cases they mean lots of eating and extra gifts for the children.

Take, for example, Romana Kappmeier of North Hollywood. As her mother had done when she was a girl in Austria, Kappmeier taught her Canadian-born children to fastidiously shine their shoes and put them outside the bedroom door Dec. 5, the eve of St. Nicholas Day. After she was sure the children were asleep, she would fill the shoes with chocolates and other sweets, as if St. Nick had been there.

“Sometimes they didn’t clean the shoes very well, and I wouldn’t give them the candy,” Kappmeier, 68, recalls.

Later that morning, she added, she would show them how to properly clean their shoes and reward them with candy.

To Kappmeier’s delight, one of her daughters continues the St. Nicholas Day tradition with her own three children.

Another Austrian tradition that Kappmeier keeps alive is decorating the Christmas tree with chocolate candies in the form of stars, bells and other holiday symbols. Scissors are kept near the tree so that visitors with children can snip off treats. Now that Kappmeier’s children are grown, she puts up a tree for customers at her delicatessen, Omadel, in North Hollywood.

For Gunilla Hamaoui of Woodland Hills, one of the high points of the holiday season is St. Lucia Day on Dec. 13. Hamaoui, who grew up in Sweden, recalls how each town would select the prettiest teen-age girl to be Lucia, and the runners-up would be her maidens. In the wee hours of the morning of the 13th, the Lucias of Sweden and their maidens would walk through the towns and wake up people with song. They were dressed in white gowns, and Lucia would wear a headdress of candles.

“The oldest daughter in each house would sing, too, and bring their parents coffee and special Lucia cakes,” Hamaoui remembers. “The candles symbolized Lucia bringing in light, warmth and joy during the short days of December, that were so dark and cold.

“It’s hard to do that here, so we have a fair every year, and we crown our Lucia then,” says Hamaoui, whom the Swedish Hollywood Club selected to be the Lucia queen in 1968. This year, the Los Angeles chapter of the Swedish Women’s Educational Assn. International will crown the Los Angeles Lucia queen at its annual Christmas fair Dec. 13 at Filmland in Culver City. (Admission is $3, children under 12 will be admitted free.)

For Hamaoui, whose husband is Egyptian but who practices Swedish holiday traditions, St. Lucia Day rings in the Christmas season, and in the days after the fair, she and her youngest son, Amir, make a gingerbread house and gingerbread tree ornaments, just as she and her mother did in Sweden.

“My mom makes the gingerbread, I cut out all the pieces and put them together,” says Amir, 13, who built his own gingerbread house last year.

Amir and his mother also bring out his favorite Christmas decoration--a huge gnome doll climbing a child-size ladder--leaning against the Christmas tree. Hamaoui’s favorite decorations are a life-size pair of straw goats that symbolize the legend that the giver of gifts arrives on a goat.

For Kappmeier and most Christian Europeans who carry on the traditions of their forefathers, the Advent calendar or wreath heralds the start of the Christmas season.

“I put up the Advent wreath the first Sunday of December and light one candle each Sunday before Christmas,” Kappmeier says. “We start playing Christmas carols and we say, ‘Christmas is coming,’ and we bake cookies and strudel.”

Vita Vilkas of Saugus also hangs an Advent wreath, and lights a new candle each Sunday before Christmas.

Vilkas, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, also buys an Advent calendar for her 4-year-old son, Aleksas. The calendars are often three-dimensional, with a window for every day of Advent. Each day she and her son open one window and read the Scripture behind it and look at the religious picture.

Even though it’s not a Lithuanian custom, “I think it started with the Germans, we used to do the Advent calendar when we were kids. It teaches children about the importance of giving and that God gave us Jesus as a gift,” Vilkas says. “I do it for Aleks so that he’ll learn, and I also teach it at Lithuanian school” on Saturdays.

As Christmas approaches, Vilkas’ family, the Polikaitis clan, and her husband’s relatives begin preparing the traditional Lithuanian feast that they will devour after sundown kucios, Christmas Eve.

The Vilkas and Polikaitis families’ Christmas Eve traditions are steeped in religious symbolism. First, the table is strewn with hay, then covered with a tablecloth--like the baby Jesus’ bed in the manger. At least 12 fish and vegetable dishes are prepared--one for every disciple--and the meal begins once a family member sees the first star in the sky, like the star over Bethlehem. Then the family sings a Lithuanian hymn.

“Everything is done in Lithuanian when we’re together because we have two great-grandmothers in the family,” Vilkas says. “One place is set for all the dead members of the family, and we remember them in prayer.

“After prayer, we break off a piece of the wafer bread that’s in the plate of the person next to us, symbolizing the breaking of bread, and we wish everybody a merry Christmas and a happy New Year and other good wishes,” Vilkas says. “Last year, they wished me a fruitful year, and I got pregnant.”

Once the meal is over, each family member pulls out a stalk of hay. Whoever has the longest one is supposed to live the longest. Then Vilkas brings out her guitar or sits at the piano and accompanies the family as they sing Christmas carols.

But the evening is not over until a gift-laden Kaledu Senis (the Lithuanian Father Christmas who is said to arrive by sleigh) knocks on the door.

“The children have to earn their gifts by saying a prayer or singing a hymn or reciting something,” Vilkas says. “Usually the older kids perform, and the young kids cry.”

Capping off the evening is midnight Mass, for which the family drives from Saugus to St. Casimir Lithuanian Catholic Church in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles.

Even though Vilkas grew up celebrating Christmas Lithuanian-style in what her mother calls Chicago’s “Lithuanian barrio,” she has taught Aleksas about “both Christmases.”

“When I was growing up, we didn’t know much about Santa, but now you go to the mall, and there’s a Santa that you take pictures with,” Vilkas says. “Aleks is aware of what the other kids are doing, so we taught him that one Santa comes all the way from Lithuania on a sleigh, and the other comes down the chimney. Even though he receives gifts Christmas Eve, when he wakes up Christmas morning and opens his gifts, you should see the look in his eyes.”

Depending on the length of time they’ve lived in the United States and where they immigrated from, Armenians observe at least one of three Christmases--Dec. 25, Dec. 31 and Jan. 6.

A large group of Armenians, particularly those from Armenia, Lebanon and Syria, gather with their families Dec. 31, when the children open their gifts around the Christmas tree after a lavish multi-course meal that culminates with sweets such as baklava.

Every New Year’s Eve, Azadouhi Ghazarian’s family, her two sisters and their families and a bevy of cousins and friends converge at Ghazarian’s brother’s home in Van Nuys, a custom they have observed since arriving in Los Angeles from Beirut in 1976.

At midnight, they turn off all the lights except those on the Christmas tree, and recite hayr mer , an Armenian prayer. “Then we turn on the lights and exchange happy wishes. A few minutes later, Santa arrives at the door. As each child’s name is read, the child has to sing or recite a poem or dance before receiving the gift,” Ghazarian says.

Then, on Jan. 6, the Ghazarians, like thousands of other Armenians, take the day off and head to one of the Los Angeles area’s more than 20 Armenian churches for the traditional Armenian Christmas liturgy. (Jan. 6, which until the 4th Century was the recognized birth date of Jesus Christ, is still observed today by many Orthodox Christians.)

Like many other Armenians, the Ghazarians also celebrate an American Christmas by joining in the festivities of her husband’s family members, who arrived in the United States more than 30 years ago.

“Even though we have relatives who celebrate Dec. 25, we have always kept our tradition,” Ghazarian says. Her children, ages 6 and 8, don’t complain, she says. They receive gifts twice.

Hamaoui’s sons also receive two rounds of Christmas gifts. They open the first batch on Christmas Eve, after a smorgasbord-type meal of lutefisk (dried fish), cured ham and cabbage, sausages and cheeses and a rice porridge with a hidden almond that is supposed to bring luck to the person who spoons it onto his plate.

For Christmas Eve, when the Swedes traditionally do most of their celebrating, Hamaoui tries to buy her sons “something to do with winter,” as her mother did for her in Sweden. So her sons, 20, 18 and 13, receive a lot of clothes on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day they get games and books--”always a book,” Hamaoui says.

When asked what his friends say about the Christmas customs in his household, Amir, the youngest, says, “It’s normal to me, but it’s weird to my friends.” Yet, he says, he likes celebrating a Swedish-style Christmas and even participates in a Swedish-youth dance group that travels to Stockholm every four years.

Some families among the Valley’s small Japanese population celebrate Christmas, but maintain key year-end customs that they learned in Japan.

Right after Christmas, Kazue Niikura of Woodland Hills sends special Japanese cards to her friends and family in Japan wishing them a happy New Year, good health and much success. Kiyoe Cline, who moved to Manhattan Beach recently, does the same.

Cline observes the Japanese custom of sending osebo, a gift presented in December, usually to a boss or a parent, as a way of saying, “Thank you for taking care of me.”