Sandy Burns has been there since the beginning.
She’s been a part of Chula Vista’s Christmas Circle tradition since it started in 1958 when she was 8 years old. It was a different time, she recalls, a decade of community-spiritedness and neighborliness, and people really got into it.
“Back then, putting lights through the trees was a group thing, a neighborhood thing,” Burns said. She knows, because she lives in the same house she grew up in. Now she’s the neighborhood’s official Christmas Circle coordinator.
It was supposed to be a temporary thing for her, but it’s a gig she’s been doing for 24 years.
Burns has shepherded the neighbors through years of Christmases, dealing with pedestrian and car traffic and helping out with decorating, even as the times and the neighborhood changed.
The Christmas Circle tradition has been going on for nearly 60 years. It’s a neighborhood effort on Chula Vista’s Whitney Street and Mankato Street, just off Second Avenue. Everyone hauls out their best holiday designs — no pressure to conform to a theme, she says, just whatever you have — and leaves their lights up. More than 50 people string up decorations and lights each year.
The combined effect is not only bright and impressive, when you add the foot and car traffic into the mix, Christmas Circle looks like a very tiny, very populated and extremely festive city of its own.
When it first began, Burns said the holiday spirit was the same as it’s ever been, but it looked very different: No inflatable decorations, no singing trees and no LED lights.
“Mostly stuff was made out of wood, mostly just one-dimensional — people mostly just made things,” Burns said.
The lights they all put through the pepper trees were large painted bulbs. Those gnarled old pepper trees are now long gone, too — they became a casualty of city planning when it turned out their roots had a particularly deadly love for sidewalks and underground plumbing.
While today’s fast-paced and internet-heavy lifestyle may lack the community-mindedness of the 1950s, or at least make it more difficult to find, there are up sides to living in the future. Rain was once disastrous for holiday decorations. Now, it’s easy to shrug off, Burns said.
“It doesn’t really seem to really break stuff so much nowadays, because stuff we have bought is made well to hold up.
But in the past things would break, foil would come off the trees, we’d find parts of our decorations down the street from the wind and whatnot,” said Burns.
“It makes it a lot easier for people to get something nice to put out in the yard, versus when we first began when most people made stuff.”
Burns says that in all that time, there has only been one year that Christmas didn’t come to Christmas Circle — sometime in the late 1970s, she said, during a big energy crisis.
“We were kind of told, ‘Don’t put up Christmas lights, don’t get a tree,’ so we didn’t. It’s the only year we didn’t. It just was weird! It was so strange at Christmas time for the circle to just be black, just dark,” she said.
