Light the neighborhood

Rocklin's Pebble Creek Christmas light celebration is celebrating its 31st year. Steve Givens has been there since the beginning. When he and his wife bought a house on the corner of the historic street, they decided to go all out and decorate it with Christmas cheer. After three or four years of living there, the neighbors expressed they wanted to decorate the street in an organized manner. "We decided to outline our lawns in lights and use Disney cutouts that were made and painted," Givens explained. "Eight of our neighbors did that and we started to end up getting traffic. We never really anticipated that. We just wanted to decorate and have fun with it." It increased from eight to 17 houses. Suddenly, the decorations went all the way to the park. Overnight, it went down the entire street. It has now grown to the entire neighborhood. "It's a bit of a phenomenon, in a way, because not every neighborhood is kind of a figure eight with three different ways to enter and exit," Givens said. "It makes it a little bit easier for the amount of traffic that we get, even though there's a lot of traffic." Givens loves the way the decorations brings the community together. He said he spends time in his driveway during the holidays and gets to meet many visitors. "We get to visit with friends that we don't see more than once a year at Christmas time that are coming to look at lights. It's those friendships that we might not see for three or four or five years otherwise, but they come to our neighborhood, and we get to kind of catch up a little bit," he said. "Yeah, it's kind of like an excuse to see each other." He describes the whole event as a labor of love. "It's really a labor of love, a lot of joy, a lot of you know, expressing our desire to celebrate what we think, at least for my wife and I, as the best time of the year is Christmas, and it's just a really fun time," Givens shared. Givens describes the Pebble Creek lights as a special thing. "If we moved in November of '90 and said, 'We're going to get 142 homes involved in this project in five years,' nobody had that plan," he said. "It just came together." You can visit the lights on Pebble Creek Drive in Rocklin.