So when Matt Riggs, who lives on the block with his wife, Carey, learned that his neighbor across the street was battling depression in December of 2020, he decided to take some vacation time. Riggs, who himself was having a tough time during the pandemic, hung up his Christmas lights early as he was in need of some joy. He managed to get a wire from the top of a tree across the road, and connect it to his neighbor’s house.
Soon, going from house to house, adding their lights until the whole block was lit. Riggs told CNN he did it again this year, with a neighbor hand-crafted a metal sign that read “Love lives here.”
“I was decorating for the holidays and I was a little early. It was actually before Thanksgiving, but it was such a dark time for all of us. I really didn’t want to wait any longer,” Riggs recalled last season. We do. “I wanted to go ahead and light things up. So, I was climbing trees and running lights in my tree and I wanted to see if I could take them down the street. And when I did So I was so excited to tell them to go across the street and keep burning.”
This was followed by Riggs’ neighbor Leiba Comiso.
“Once Matt did that, I talked to my street neighbor and I was like, ‘Hey, let’s do this too,'” she says. “It’ll book up the block, you’ll drive through a light and then when you get out of the block, you’re out of it. But it’s so hard to hang those lights up, which one can’t even imagine.”
That’s where Tom Desert came in. He’s the handy neighbor who soon figured out how to rig up one strand after another, building a canopy over the block and anchoring each lawn to hold the wires in place.
“Once I was done, Tom came out and he was helping us because it’s really hard. They’re heavy, they’re light,” says Comiso. “Tom was able to get our lights on and then we were like, everybody does it.”
She says a bunch of neighbors got into the car and “emptied Home Depot.”
message of love
Neighbor Melissa DiMuzio decided to add a nice touch. During the binging show on Netflix, she hooked up a wire hanger to a sign that read, “Love Lives Here.” He wrapped it in lights and Desert helped to display it as well.
“I really missed hanging out my own strand, and I really wanted to participate,” DiMuzio tells CNN. “It was shaking to look like there were six or seven light strands going down the road. And so I made the sign.”
Dimuzio indicated to the neighbors what the sign should say.
“It allowed me to think outside the Happy Holiday Arena,” she says. “Last love lived here, which is actually on a wooden plaque in my garage that my mom gave me.”
Desert says it was a perfect fit.
“We have 32 houses on this block and despite differences in views and beliefs, however you want to see it, everyone here loves each other,” he says. “I think love lives here. It’s an explanation of how it works on this block.”
Comiso agrees.
“It’s a very special place,” she says, “that we raise everyone’s kids here.”
This year, Block also added a larger mailbox where kids can drop off their letters to mail to Santa Claus at the North Pole.
When everything goes downhill in January, Desert is in charge of that too.
“I might have to take a day off to take it down. At least the high ones,” he says. “They’re about 30 feet in the air on the block’s highest peaks.”
They say that Riggs’ neighbor who was originally expected to be happy is doing better these days. The mass lighting display has increased everyone’s enthusiasm.
“We all suffer from time to time,” Riggs says. “This time last year she was in a dark place and so was I. I applied and was offered three jobs and they were all canceled because of covid and I just broke down and lost. I guess That anyone needs a little light in their life, this would be a great neighborhood to go to.”
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