Lighting up with community spirit

COSTA MESA — For the next two weeks, a drive past Sandi Rios’ Baker Street home may leave you thinking you’re in a Coke commercial.

She’ll start putting up her holiday decorations today, and she’s going all out.

“I bought a big igloo and polar bears, and I’ve got penguins,” she said, and her goddaughters will help her hang snowflakes around the yard.

Those trimmings are in addition to the icicle lights around Rios’ eaves and nutcrackers in her window.

Rios’ holiday scene is just one part of a decorating frenzy up and down three blocks of Baker Street. The occasion is the first Christmas lights lane Baker Street residents have held, and possibly the only one in Costa Mesa this year.

“We’re trying to take a lemon situation and turn it into lemonade,” said Dan Worthington, who lives on nearby Mindanao Drive and helped urge residents to decorate their homes. Three cash prizes to be awarded for the best decorations also helped.

Some of the homes on the street could use sprucing up, Worthington said, so he’s tried to mobilize people who live there to make improvements. In 2005, he helped residents request that the city plant street trees, and they then successfully petitioned to have the extra-wide street re-striped to slow drivers down.

Those efforts have gotten homeowners more involved, and the proof is the Christmas lights lane. About 37 homes in the three blocks on Baker between Royal Palm and Labrador drives will be decorated with inflatable Santas, nativity scenes and the like, Worthington said. Residents will turn their holiday lights on for two hours a night starting Sunday.

Some homes are already decked out, and Worthington and Mike Scheafer of the Costa Mesa-Newport Harbor Lions Club helped residents put up some lights Thursday. Scheafer recently ran for City Council but was not elected.

Nativity scenes and reindeer were popular, but one of the most unusual set-ups involved a ball wound with lights and stuck in a tree to look like the moon with a dog howling at the foot of a lighted cactus-like sculpture.

Years ago, Scheafer remembered, a holiday decorations contest was sponsored by the Daily Pilot, but that ended in the 1970s. As far as he and Worthington know, they said, there’s no Christmas lights lane in the city other than Baker Street’s.

Margie Walker, who’s lived on Baker Street since the 1950s, said she’s looking forward to when the lights go on.

“I think it’ll be fantastic,” she said.