‘Lights bring us together’: 44-year Peacock Lane resident illuminates what life’s like on Portland’s ‘Christmas Street’

Published 10:00 am Friday, December 13, 2024

“It’s great living here 50 weeks of the year.”

That’s what Toni Anderson’s husband, Jesse, loves to say about their decades spent living on Peacock Lane in Portland.

And no, he’s no Ebenezer Scrooge, he just likes to crack jokes.

Portland’s “Christmas Street,” Peacock Lane, becomes a street that any character from any holiday movie ever made probably would have wished they lived on. The homes, mostly in English Cottage or Tudor Revival styles, are adorned with holiday lights each year since about 1930. They are all on Southeast 40th Avenue, between Stark and Belmont streets.

One house is consistently decorated in the theme of “The Grinch,” and showcases a single veto vote against the annual decorating, in the true grumpy fashion of the iconic green, furry, pot-bellied creature.

Anderson moved to Peacock Lane in February 1984, when the home cost a whopping $60,200.

She and her husband both grew up locally, having visited the holiday street as children, but really fell in love with the home. The door looks like one belonging to Bilbo Baggins’ Hobbit-burrow, and the inside of the house is quaint. It’s far from the grandiose modern homes seen now.

“It just felt like home to me,” Anderson said, reminiscing on the similarities to her childhood house.

All of the street’s homes were built by a single developer and architect, Richard F. Wassell, with one new home built just before 2017, when the street decided to join the National Register of Historic Places for preservation purposes.

The Anderson’s first holiday season on Peacock Lane — in the ‘80s — was a learning curve.

Anderson said that everyone who sells a house leaves almost anything and everything related to Christmas décor.

With miles and miles of C9 lights roped around him, a brand new 28-foot ladder, and another $50 worth of extension cords, her husband got to work while she stowed away, staying warm and baking Christmas cookies.

“It was a whole new world,” Anderson said. “We were like, ‘Hmph, this is what it takes to live on the street.’”

Slowly, but surely, lights made their way up to the tiny peak atop the home.

“Since we have moved in, every year, it’s been bigger — it’s 40 years of a bigger and bigger,” Anderson said of the streets ever-evolving light displays.

But those living on Peacock Lane ride a spectrum of Christmas love. In fact, all the decorating is on a voluntary basis. Some folks on the lane keep Christmas up all year — red and white linoleum flooring, lights, Santa, the works — while others bust out a few inflatables for the yard and call it good.

What the lights provide, Anderson said, is a strong sense of community. Of the 32 homes, she knows everyone’s name, everyone’s number, everyone’s email, their children, where they go to school and more.

“It’s almost like if we didn’t have the lights, we wouldn’t have any of that. Lights bring us together,” Anderson said. “It’s our responsibility to continue the tradition. It’s part of a long, long thing that’s bigger than we are.”

And although Anderson said she feels the inherent urge to deck the halls and decorate, she still describes their home as boring.

Their take on decorating is “traditional,” hanging multi-colored lights along the trim of their house and adding some to the bushes. This year, they’re amping things up with a giant “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” inflatable out front.

Leading up to opening day, Dec. 15 this year, Anderson could only think one thing: deadlines.

“Do the lights work? Do the timers work? Did we get the tree up?

When they first moved, it was all about neighborhood parties where folks would drink one too many spiked eggnogs and end up sleeping on the floor. Now, after having children, they spend the evenings people-watching the folks outside.

One year, Anderson recounted traditions of a horse and carriage that would visit the lane. It would trot down a ways before making a U-turn. One year, a car had bumped into the wheel of the buggy, and off went the horse. He lunged between one of the trees in her yard, eventually caught down the road.

And to remember it by, was a plate-sized hoof print in their sidewalk.

Other years have looked like pipers performing in their yard, as her husband brought out a bottle of scotch to share, no cups required, swigging straight from the bottle.

“We dream of it,” Anderson joked when asked if they have ever missed a Peacock Lane celebration.

But the street is just too special to leave.

When their daughters, Kassidy and Katlin, were little, they’d pop their heads over the couch in the front window, watching the passersby.

And as an early Christmas present, the Andersons are welcoming a newborn grandbaby, Dane, into the family-fun of Peacock Lane.

“It’s just a great neighborhood,” she said. “All the houses have changed, and it happens so gradually that you look up one day and go, ‘Wow, we’re really the only ones left on this side of the street that haven’t moved,’ but yet nothing has stopped the Christmas lights.”

More Information

To see the decorated Southeast Portland houses on Peacock Lane via walking or driving, openings are from 6-11 p.m. each night from Dec. 15 through Dec. 31. Some nights (Dec. 15 and 16) are closed to cars. It’s located off Southeast Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard between Stark and Belmont streets. More information at peacocklane.org.