Lifestyle
How does a holiday tradition shine for 104 years? Meet Altadena's village of volunteers
• Christmas Tree Lane in Altadena is a neighborhood holiday lights extravaganza that’s taken place nearly every year since 1920.
• 135 deodar cedars stretching nearly a mile along Santa Rosa Avenue are strung with lights by volunteers each year for the event.
• This year’s lighting ceremony and winter festival takes place from 3 to 9 p.m. — the lights turn on at 6 p.m. — on Dec. 7.
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.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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