Bringing Light to The McKenzie Valley

It’s going to be a difficult holiday season for many in the McKenzie valley. Some will spend it in hotel rooms after being displaced for months, while others camp out in RV or even tents on their properties as they work on repairing and rebuilding their lives after the Holiday Farm Fire. And all this comes on top of an ongoing raging pandemic which will stop us from safely gathering with our loved ones to celebrate, something that seems like a particularly cruel blow to people who have been through so much.

In the context of so much heartache, it might seem strange to think about such a trivial thing as putting out some holiday lights, yet the McKenzie CDC is inviting the community to do just that.

You can already see some of the “McKenzie Holiday Lights” displays along the river, and over the coming month the hope is that many more will join in, helping to cheer hearts and bring the valley’s communities closer together.

This is the first time that all these communities have been invited to take part simultaneously, but many might remember last year’s Festival of Lights in Blue River, which inspired this idea. It all started back in 1994, Blue River resident and community organizer Pat Stanley wanted to light up the town for the holidays.

“Our parents purchased Meyer’s General Store, and from there our mom began her involvement in EVERYTHING Blue River related,” says Pat’s daughter Melanie Stanley, who still ran and owned that same store with her twin sister Melissa up until it was destroyed by the fire on Labor Day.

Pat was a Founding member of the Blue River Community Development Corporation (which has since become McKenzie CDC) and she spearheaded a partnership with
Lane Electric and a local electrician to get the bridge in Blue River lit alongside Good Pasture and Belknap Bridges. From 1994 until she passed away in 2000, Pat ensured this happened, but without her driving force, the tradition of lighting the bridge did not continue.

Nearly twenty years later, however, Melanie and Melissa took up that dream again, deciding to revive their mother’s vision and honor her memory by lighting up and decorating Blue River’s Main Street – and so they did with help from the entire community which celebrated the season with a ornament-making parties, caroling, and yummy treats aplenty.

“We managed to create the 25 Days of Christmas, where a new decoration was placed every day until Christmas, and made it kind of a game to figure out what the new thing was each day. It was EVERYTHING my mom would have dreamed it could be,” Melanie recalls.

So 2019 looked set to be the first of many bright Christmas seasons in town. But then, of course, 2020 happened.

As Christmas approaches this year, the streets surrounding Blue River Bridge are entirely unrecognizable. No structure is left standing, and there is darkness everywhere. In a word, it’s heartbreaking.

Yet in spite of all the sadness before it and the challenges ahead, there is momentum building towards having a “Blue River Festival of Lights” this year, to both memorialize what was lost but also look ahead to a future which can also be bright as the community rallies and rebuilds.

Having only recently moved to Blue River myself, over the summer I had bought and strung out various sets of solar lights around our little plot of land, just next to the Blue River Park. I remember that my favorite part of each day was watching the sunset, spotting bats as dusk fell, and seeing the lights gradually turn on, giving the place a cheery fairground vibe.

After Labor Day, the park next to us was devastated, and all the houses around were just… gone, but the first time I stayed the night in our land after the fire, I watched as several of those string lights stubbornly came back on, one after another, and in the dark things looked almost like they did before.

So I decided to take up the CDC’s invitation, and string up a few extra lights. Being a Lewis Carroll fan named Alice, I always did think that this little corner of the world was imminently suited for a Mad Hatter’s tea party, so I supposed that influenced my choice of theme. The McKenzie does “quirky” very well, and I think that if 2020 has taught us anything, is that you have to embrace the madness, and take solace in beauty wherever you happen to find it.