Volunteers are lifeblood of Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane

Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane Association relies on more than 100 volunteers to install its annual holiday light display and organize its free winter festival and lighting ceremony, scheduled for Dec.6 this year. But with the community in ruins and more than half of its volunteers displaced by the Eaton fire in January, will the association have enough helpers — and heart — to get the job done? Actually, says association President Scott Wardlaw, the bigger concern now is whether the organization will be deluged with volunteers when work begins this month hanging long strands of lights on the massive droopy limbs of the 135 deodar cedars that line either side of Santa Rosa Avenue, a.k.a. Christmas Tree Lane, for nearly a mile. That’s why this year — the event’s 105th anniversary — association leaders are asking for volunteers to sign up ahead of time, Wardlaw said, so they can ensure that they have enough helpers and enough jobs for those helpers over the next 10 to 12 weekends it generally takes to put up the lights.

The association started getting inquiries this summer from people around Southern California, said Mikayla Arevalo, the association’s volunteer coordinator and communications director. People wanted to know if the trees survived the fire that destroyed more than 9,400 structures in Altadena and whether they could help the popular winter festival and lighting ceremony return again this year. One of the miracles of the fire is that the cedars did survive, mostly intact except for a few limbs that were broken in the fierce winds. Some residents credit the massive trees for sheltering the homes beneath from the wind-driven embers that destroyed many other structures. The lights were still on the trees when the winds began in January, but several strings were broken. Most of the association’s equipment survived in storage bins despite their proximity to other structures that burned.

Things didn’t go so well for Christmas Tree Lane’s longtime Santa, Jim Vitale. The 1905-era home, where he and his wife, artist Dale LaCasella, had lived since 1993, burned along with all their belongings. Despite the aftermath of the fire, the longtime volunteers for the association will be back this year at the festival, even though they now live 25 miles east in La Verne. Vitale and LaCasella started playing Santa and Mrs. Claus, respectively, for the winter festival about 15 years ago. Vitale’s elaborate Santa costume, including his 130-year-old strand of brass sleigh bells and hand-carved belt, were all destroyed in the fire, along with LaCasella’s handmade green-and-red felt elf shoes and vest.

“We managed to leave the site with two cars, two laptops, our cat and the clothes on our backs,” Vitale said. “All our buildings, my [backyard] winery, my wife’s studio in our old carriage house, my library with 10,000 volumes about architecture and the history of California ... all gone.” LaCasella, a retired attorney, said she and her husband decided against rebuilding “because we’re too old. I’m almost 80 and I decided I couldn’t wait two years in some temporary location” until the house was rebuilt. But she’s still very involved in her old community as the president of the senior centre, which was destroyed in the fire. She drives into Altadena a few days a week to teach art classes and help find a new place for the seniors to meet until the centre can be rebuilt. Vitale, a retired home inspector and accessibility specialist for the state, is busy reassembling Santa costume parts. He has played Santa for years at various locations in Southern California, including Riverside’s Mission Inn, but his daylong volunteer stint as Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane Santa is dearest to his heart.

“As long as I can still walk and talk, and whether I live in La Verne or wherever, I’ll will always be their Santa until the Lord says, ‘Hang it up,’” Vitale said. “It’s for the love of Altadena and the history behind Altadena. You see other [communities] where people aren’t talking to each other and they have walls all around, but that’s not what Altadena and Christmas Tree Lane are about. It’s about talking to your neighbours and welcoming people. There’s just a sense of pride you don’t see in other places, and I want to preserve that history and that feeling.” It’s hard to pinpoint what makes Christmas Tree Lane’s bare-bone light display so popular. Visitors won’t experience any flashing lights, dancing elves or blaring carols. It’s just a quiet drive beneath a near mile of stately cedars bedecked with strings of multicolour lights. “I think the simplicity is what really draws people,” Arevalo said. “That and the tradition. ... We’re a historical landmark, and I think people just love the small town feel. When you’re driving through, it seems like you’re out in the woods somewhere, not in a city. It just feels magical.”

But creating that magic requires weeks of strenuous work, Arevalo said. Volunteers typically start stringing lights the second weekend of September, but the start date hasn’t been set yet this year because the association is still trying to finalize its required permits with the county. Volunteers work every Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to noon until the work is finished, usually by early November. The workers check and replace the large plastic bulbs on the long strings of lights and then use pulleys and hoists to hang and sometimes muscle those long strands of faceted lights onto the branches. This year, workers will also need to assemble new 15-foot-strands of lights because many were broken during the windstorm that fueled the Eaton fire, Wardlaw said. Volunteers need to be at least age 13 to help. Many local high school students are regular volunteers at the light-stringing sessions and earn the 40 volunteer hours they need to graduate.

That’s how Warren and Isabelle Skidmore’s family got involved many years ago, when their daughters Hannah, 19, and Tessa, 17, started helping as freshmen at John Muir High School. Ultimately, the girls earned more than 400 volunteer hours, primarily from working on Christmas Tree Lane. Initially, they showed up just to get their hours, Hannah said. But they soon came to realise that the work they were doing was continuing a tradition they had loved as little kids — and taken for granted, never realising how many people it requires year after year to make it happen. “When you see thousands of people show up (for the lighting ceremony), it feels good to know you helped make it happen,” Hannah said.

Tessa said she was initially motivated to put in all those extra hours for the challenge of earning the 200-hour volunteer medallion offered at the high school, but by the end, she said, “We were doing it for the love of being on the lane.” It’s not like the Skidmores aren’t busy. Their home — the only home the girls have ever known — was one of some 6,000 destroyed in the Eaton fire, so now the family is basically camping out in a Sierra Madre apartment until their house can be rebuilt.

Warren, an astrophysicist, is acting as the subcontractor for their rebuilding project, but he also accepted a new job in Hawaii right after the fire as deputy director of NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility at the University of Hawaii. Warren comes home to Altadena as many weekends as he can manage, but Isabelle said she stayed in Sierra Madre to be his “boots on the ground,” making sure the various jobs are completed, while their daughters go to school at Pasadena City College.