Luminaries 2024
Our rare and renowned entire-neighborhood luminary display does not happen by magic, although viewing all our streets and their holiday decorations on Luminary Display Night does seem magical! Our neighborhood display has been confirmed by a longstanding resident to go back to at least 1970 when they moved to Colonial Hills — and year after year, generation after generation, our residents make this display possible with their volunteering and participation.
So, for this year, I want to greatly thank each of our 29 adult and 13 youth volunteers, some of whom are shown in the photos, and who completed assembly of 902 kits for our 826 homes at 10:50 AM, one of the fastest times on record. And a big thanks to our Trustees (many of whom also volunteered for kit assembly) who picked up their bundles of kits for their districts, and then delivered their kits to each resident in their district.
And a shout out to two volunteers for their special work this year: to Al Symth, who for the 11th year in a row, delivered bundles of kits to the homes of trustees who were not able to pick up their bundles by 1:00 PM Saturday afternoon, including one delivery to all the homes in one district, and also to Dave Nadolny, who along with his volunteers, set out 75 luminaries, on both sides of E. Selby, in front of the apartments and condos, all the way from the St. Machael parking lot to 164 E. Selby, due to the resignation in September of longstanding apartment/condos Luminary Trustee Shelley McCoy.
And it would be bad karma to neglect to thank Mother Nature for the inexplicable weather behavior year after year (knock on wood) of giving us fairly, if not completely, non-raining, non-heavily snowing, and fairly mild days, for both Kit Assembly Saturday and Luminary Display Sunday.
So accordingly and thankfully, for Luminary Display Sunday, it was a mild 46 degrees, and the rain, which had been spitting around 7:00 PM stopped completely by 8:00 PM. As I drove each street, joy and laughter abounded, with lots of family members of all ages, both 2 and 4-legged, walking in the streets.
The long expanses of streets, with their virtually 100% participation were wondrous to see, such as on E. Selby from St. Michael all the way to Foster, the middle part of Park, and all of Meadoway, Park Overlook and Hardy Way including its front part on Park and Colonial, the northern section of Indianola, and all of E. Southington. And our other streets also had very high participation rates, around 90% — and so again, Thank You, Neighbors!
Finally, the CHCA wishes to thank our two Luminary Event sponsors for their very generous donations for this event: Erin Hunt Glowacki, the Powell Buehler Group and The Roof Detective.
Will Pearce
Luminary Event Chair
(And now for the photos (Photo Credit: CHCA Webmaster) – please click the “Continue reading” link below to see these pics which have the following descriptions)
_01 Inside Kit Assembly #1
_02 Inside Kit Assembly #2
_03 Inside Kit Assembly #3
_04 Outside Kit Assembly #1
_05 Outside Kit Assembly #2
_06 Outside Kit Assembly #3
