In The Spotlight: Belcoda Luminaries

For over 30 years, a trail of luminaria has been a Christmas Eve tradition on Belcoda Drive.  Barbara Zimmerman, Becloda resident since 1976, shares her story of how this beautiful idea was born.

The history of the Belcoda luminaries started in my kitchen over a cup of tea with a dear friend/next door neighbor Ross Scott many years ago.  At the time, I was telling Scottie about a friend’s street in East Irondequoit that did the luminaries.  He said OK, let’s find out how they do it and we can too.

It took a few years to get the entire street to participate but once it was perfected, the majority was won over. We have neighbors who don’t celebrate Christmas but everyone is gracious enough to let us put the candles on their property anyway.  There is so much traffic on our street Christmas Eve!  People would drive down the street just to see how pretty it looked.

We started out using white wax bakery bags but had one Christmas Eve, which was a windy, rainy night, and the majority of the candles went out or the bags burned!! Everyone was to use their own candles and some burned for longer than others.

So back to the drawing board…..

I found the longer burning candles at a local Christian store and another neighbor suggested using the milk jugs which worked out much better. Scottie would start working on them in Sept/Oct, ordering the candles, saving milk jugs for people who didn’t have them, testing them out on his deck in the middle of the summer, suggesting putting more candles along the St. Paul houses to draw people’s attention to the street, putting together approx. 60 candle sets and hosting the pick up/delivery of the candles in the first week of December. We also had a large American flag draped across the street on Christmas Eve 2001 after 9/11.

Unfortunately, Scottie died a few years ago but his legend lives on every Christmas Eve.  Mike Mirabella took over Scottie’s job and has done a wonderful job. I am not sure of the date of the first year we did this but it has been at least 30 years!