How does a holiday tradition shine for 104 years? Meet Altadena's village of volunteers

If Santa were skinny and endlessly energetic, he’d be a dead ringer for Scott Wardlaw, president and chief cheerleader of Altadena’s 104-year holiday tradition known as Christmas Tree Lane.

But Wardlaw’s domain is nowhere near the North Pole. Since late September, sometimes in triple-digit heat, he’s been wrangling 20 to 30 volunteers every Saturday and Sunday to get the lane’s 135 massive deodar cedars strung with lights in time for the holidays.

His crew is mostly high school students collecting community service hours along with old hands who have been using wobbly ladders, ropes and pulleys for years to string long strands of lights from the cedars’ graceful branches.

Once the lights are pulled as high as the pulleys will allow, the volunteers whip and flip the strands of lights as best they can from the ground to cover the canopy of bristly branches that stretch nearly a mile along Santa Rosa Avenue (the real name of Christmas Tree Lane) from Woodbury Road to East Mariposa Street.

Wardlaw is 76 and walks with a limp, but on a Saturday in late October, it doesn’t stop him from striding up and down the block repeatedly, answering questions, encouraging newcomers and demonstrating how to muscle a stubborn string of lights up and over an uncooperative branch.

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1. Scott Wardlaw, 76, president of the Altadena Christmas Tree Lane Assn., pulls on a string of lights while hanging lights on the massive deodar cedars on Santa Rosa Avenue. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) 2. A volunteer carries a basket of LED light bulbs that will be used on Christmas Tree Lane. 3. Volunteer Clyde Haslett, 13, clutches a handful of lights to replace burned-out bulbs. 4. Volunteer Clyde Haslett tackles the tedious but necessary job of replacing burned-out lights. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

It takes nearly 10 weekends to get the lights in place in time for the annual Christmas Tree Lane Lighting Ceremony and Winter Festival, which this year is from 3 to 9 p.m. Saturday and includes vendors and speakers outside the Altadena Public Library. The lights come on at 6 p.m., and visitors will be able to walk the lane until 9 p.m. to admire the display, which is then open to vehicles until the lights go out on Jan. 5.

After all that, the volunteers turn out again for another eight to 10 weekends — depending on the weather — to take the lights back down. It’s not possible to leave the lights up during the year, Wardlaw said. High winds and/or heavy rains can damage the strings, and the trees grow so rapidly that lights quickly become unreachable and can’t be removed for maintenance.

Santa Rosa Avenue has no sidewalks or street lights, so for safety’s sake, once it reopens to traffic, Wardlaw recommends that visitors drive the route. And many thousands do every year, despite the old-school, low-tech display: basically long strands of multicolored lights hoisted a good 30 feet high on the cedars’ stately branches, creating a quiet canopy of sparkly colors for the slow-moving cars lined up underneath.

Temple City High School student Desmond Xie, 14, left, gathers a string of lights to be pulled up into one of the 135 deodar cedar trees that are decorated each year on Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“A lot of people are looking for flashy, blinky lights and the sound of music, but that’s not really what we’re about here,” said volunteer foreman Derek Nowak, a 22-year-old urban planning student at Cal Poly Pomona who began helping with the lights when he was 8.

“We’ve had people ask us, ‘Can’t you at least sync it to some music?’ And we have to say, ‘Well, no, unless you want to sit out here every night and flip the switch,” Nowak said, rolling his eyes.

Nowak is a steady, unflappable volunteer who shows up every Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to noon to make sure the work is completed properly. He grew up around the corner from Christmas Tree Lane, and during the holidays, he’s the one who comes out at night, during wind and rainstorms, to fix lights that aren’t working.

He’s been replacing bulbs and rewiring these light strands since he was a teen under the tutelage of his predecessor, longtime volunteer Tony Ward, and he probably knows the ropes almost as well as Wardlaw, who’s been a volunteer since 2008. But he’s taken aback when he’s asked to explain why such an old-fashioned tradition persists.

“What we’re doing is more for the history,” he said finally. “This is something special for the identity of the community. It makes us unique, in a way.”

Volunteers Casty Fortich, from left, and Temple City High School student Patience Cam, 14, pull on a string of light bulbs as Scott Wardlaw and Feli Hernandez, right, look on.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Sisters Tessa and Hannah Skidmore seem just as flummoxed by the question about why Christmas Tree Lane has been a hit for generations. Tessa, a junior at John Muir High School, followed the lead of Hannah, a senior, who joined the crew as a freshman to collect community service hours. Students need 40 hours of community service to graduate. Hannah, after some prodding from Wardlaw, admits she has 400 community service hours, many from her years of volunteering at Christmas Tree Lane.

But why? Hannah stares at her sister, who laughs and shrugs. “It’s cool to see your work on display when it’s done,” Hannah said finally. “It’s not always fun to be out here, but it’s pretty wonderful to see what the end is. You couldn’t have all this without community service. I guess it’s because it makes things better.”

Her friend Aaydan Aguilar, another John Muir senior, also started his freshman year. At first, he said, it was just for the community service hours. He learned through the school’s Interact Club that the lights he’d loved all his life weren’t put up by the city. “It was this little community organization that needed help,” he said. “And I take care of my own.”

Learning that Christmas Tree Lane is a volunteer operation makes an impression on people, said Ward, 80, who began helping with the lights soon after he and his wife, Maureen, moved to Santa Rosa Avenue in 1971.

They started slow at first, helping to install lights on their block, but eventually their involvement grew. Both served as presidents of the organization, and all five of their children were drafted as volunteers. (“It was an expectation in the Ward household,” Maureen said, laughing.)

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1. Derek Nowak, 22, volunteer foreman of the Christmas Tree Lane installations, prepares to plug a string of lights into an electrical box installed on every deodar cedar on Santa Rose Avenue. Nowak has been helping with the installations since he was 8. 2. Longtime volunteers Tony Ward, 80, and his wife Maureen, 74, have been involved with the Christmas Tree Lane Assn. since they moved to their home on Santa Rosa Avenue in 1971. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

But over their decades of service, they never really considered making any changes to the display. “We’ve had feedback,” Tony said, “that people like the small-town atmosphere of Christmas Tree Lane.”

The lane’s history (compiled in a series of short videos by Altadena Libraries, the Altadena Historical Society and Christmas Tree Lane Assn.) dates back to the community’s creation. Back in the 1880s, what is now Santa Rosa Avenue was actually built to be the grand entrance to the home of Altadena’s founder, real estate developer and rancher John Woodbury.

In 1883, Woodbury saw and fell in love with deodar cedars, which are native to the Himalayas in India. The cedars came to Altadena via Italy. After he determined the cedars could thrive in Southern California, Woodbury bought some seeds and had his brother (and partner) Frederick grow them into young trees on their ranch in Altadena. Frederick had already built his house next to the site where John planned to build his.

Two years later, the trees were planted along the long driveway leading to John Woodbury’s future home, under the supervision of ranch foreman Tom Hoag, according to the Christmas Tree Lane Assn.’s official history.

A volunteer from Temple City High School makes sure there are no faulty light bulbs.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In those days, the long driveway that would become Santa Rosa Avenue was compacted dirt, so lots of effort went into keeping the surface intact during rainstorms, when runoff from the foothills tried to wash it away, Wardlaw said. The solution was mounding the road a bit in the center and building sloping stone-lined ditches on both sides of the avenue to carry the runoff away.

Those slippery ditches still function well today, but they make working against the trees challenging. The adult volunteers have to carefully adjust their ladders to get firm purchase on the stones, so they can climb up to the power boxes installed on the trunk of each tree, a good 15 to 20 feet above the ground. The ladders look a bit precarious, and student volunteers aren’t permitted to use them. But longtime volunteers such as Tony Price and Casty Fortich climb up and down with ease, plugging each string of lights into its power box to make sure they work.

John Woodbury never built his grand house due to the real estate bust of 1887, but the stately avenue became part of his legacy, coming to be known as the Avenue of the Deodars. In 1920, Altadena resident and Pasadena department store owner Frederick C. Nash came up with the idea of stringing lights along the cedars during the holidays.

Nash enlisted help from the city of Pasadena and fellow members of the Pasadena Kiwanis Club to light up a quarter mile of the street.

Within a few years all the deodars were strung with lights, and ever since, people have come by the thousands to admire them. The only years the lights weren’t on was during 1943 and 1944 — not because of World War II, but because the snowpack was very low those years, causing concerns there wouldn’t be enough water to generate hydro electricity, according to the history.

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1. A vintage postcard bearing a 1947 postmark, from the collection of L.A. Times reporter Patt Morrison, tells the story of Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane, although the dates differ from the Christmas Tree Lane Assn.’s official history that Frederick C. Nash started the lighting in 1920. 2. From Dec. 25, 1948: “BRIGHT HIGHWAY — Lights on Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane went on last night, and more than 1,000 cars witnessed the annual spectacle of brilliantly lighted 80-foot trees,” according to The Times. (Los Angeles Times)

Motorists cruise Santa Rosa Avenue, better known as Christmas Tree Lane in Altadena, in 2018. The holiday light tradition has continued in pretty much the same way for 100 years.

(Calvin B. Alagot / Los Angeles Times)

In 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the annual Christmas Tree Lane Lighting Festival, but volunteers still got together to hang the lights.

The lighting ceremony and winter festival resumed in 2022, and the display continues pretty much the same as it’s been for the last century. The Christmas Tree Lane Assn. raises money by selling merchandise during the festival and offering $35 memberships to cover power costs, replacement lights and maintenance on the aging cedars.

Many of these trees are more than 140 years old, after all, and the association is always looking ahead, Ward said. In their native Himalayas, deodar cedars reportedly live many centuries, but their lifespans are typically shorter in other parts of the world. Thus, deodar sprouts are carefully collected on the street and tended by a resident on the avenue until they’re big enough to be replanted. Volunteers fill in gaps with saplings sprouted from mature trees growing right there on the avenue.

There has been one significant modernization: The association saved a bundle on its electric bill about five years ago when it switched from incandescent, easy-to-break glass bulbs to plastic LED lights. The lights are faceted, Wardlaw said, so they give off better light and they rarely break. Best of all, the association’s power bill dropped from about $2,500 to under $500.

Nowak, the young foreman of few words, oversees all the wiring. It’s his primary job to ensure the lights go on smoothly during the ceremony on Saturday and stay on throughout the season, and he takes his responsibility seriously. He hopes to find a job in the area after he graduates in June because he likes this community. This is his home. And he expects his work with Christmas Tree Lane to continue for as long as it can.

“I know it won’t last forever,” he said. “Eventually there will be a point where time and availability will be harder and harder, but for the time being, it’s something I will be doing.”

Traditions are important, Nowak said. Christmas Tree Lane helps define his community, and for better or worse, he has a role in keeping that tradition alive. “This started before me,” he said. “I don’t want to be the reason it stopped.”