Santa Ana Heights, a Community Where Neighbors Like Neighbors

If you’re driving through Santa Ana Heights--a tiny residential enclave bounded by Bristol Street, Irvine Avenue and Jamboree Boulevard near John Wayne Airport--this evening, you’ll likely see a jovial mix of men, women and children shoveling sand into small brown bags. If you come back later, you’ll see the bags, containing lighted candles, stretched out every few feet along Azure Avenue.

I suppose it’s a modest project as far as Christmas decorations go. It doesn’t cost much--just 10 bucks a household to buy the materials. The labor is free. But it’s a labor of love and a community effort that catches magnificently what I like to think is the Christmas spirit. The folks who live in Santa Ana Heights wouldn’t approve of getting sappy about it, but I see my neighborhood as a microcosm of the values we celebrate at this time of year: humanity, generosity, kindness, tolerance, helpfulness, and the kind of humility that comes from strength--all of which make it a pretty special place.

Santa Ana Heights is an orphaned community squeezed between fingers of Newport Beach, the back bay and the airport. Although there have been passes at annexing it--mostly by Newport Beach--during the past decade, it still belongs, a little tenuously, to the county. It is bedeviled by noise from planes taking off and landing at nearby John Wayne, harassed by encroaching commercialism, and the subject of frequent studies by the Board of Supervisors, which seems to find Santa Ana Heights more an irritation than an asset.

Although its borders have eroded and its future is constantly being threatened by the exercise of eminent domain to cash in on the commercial growth of the airport area, there is no fortress mentality in Santa Ana Heights. We just add rooms to our houses and burn our candles at Christmas and help one another the rest of the year. And take things as they come.

We’re a strange, iconoclastic mix, with lots of kids, dogs and RVs. It’s one of the few populated areas in the county that allows horses, so we have them wandering our streets frequently. Our neighbors range from retirees to young people just starting families, from business executives to blue-collar workers. Our driveways house all sorts of trailers and motorcycles, basketball hoops and garage sales. On a summer evening, the street in front of our house is full of kids racing around in the twilight, with their elders gathered in clumps in front yards idling and talking. And on Christmas Eve, the elders and kids work together to load the bags and distribute the candles.

I remember neighborhoods like this when I lived in the Midwest, but they seem harder to come by in Orange County.

Sure, there are fewer traditions, shallower roots, more diversions here--which make it tougher to build a community feeling. But somehow we’ve transcended all those pitfalls in my area of Santa Ana Heights, and I really believe that if every neighborhood functioned the way mine does, we wouldn’t have so much shaping up to do come Christmastime.

We all have rather clear identities in my neighborhood, and we draw shamelessly on one another to share our strengths and shore up our weaknesses because the exchanges seem to balance out in the long run. Everyone knows, for example, that I’m a mechanical illiterate, so they rally round--without patronizing me--whenever I can’t find the main gas valve or my toilet threatens to flood the house. But when they need a letter typed or an ad written or a house watched, we have a chance to return the favor. We routinely exchange baby-sitting and pick-ups at the airport and food and drink and sympathetic ears.

And muscle, such as it is. When the people three doors down built a redwood deck in their back yard, neighbors dropped by periodically to get in a few licks with the hammer. (It was discreetly suggested to me that I might help in some other way since I was missing the nails and denting the boards.) When my hot water heater ruptured in a spectacular flood tide, another neighbor who works as a longshoreman and moonlights doing odd jobs around the neighborhood gave up a weekend he had planned to put in a new heater for us because, he said, he didn’t want one of his people to be without hot water.

And we’ve learned to play with each other’s biases--instead of getting worked up about them. When my next door neighbor, who is of a different political persuasion, draped a newspaper over a candidate sign in my front yard on the morning of Election Day, I waited until he went to work, then transplanted the sign in his front yard--where it stood the rest of the day.

That’s how it goes in my neighborhood in Santa Ana Heights--and it’s why I say we have a sense of Christmas there all year. But that won’t stop us from pouring our sand and lighting our candles on Christmas Eve. It’s the first present we open each year--this sense of community. And it’s a terrific way to start the holiday.