THOUSAND OAKS : Student Hailed for Her Virtues Portrays Saint

A crown of seven candles flickering on her head, Allison Pilmer walked slowly across the sanctuary of the Samuelson Chapel at Cal Lutheran University.

Pilmer, a senior political science major who grew up in Ohio, was elected for her saintly virtues by her fellow students to play the role of Santa Lucia in the Thousand Oaks school’s annual Christmas festival.

Ordinarily, Pilmer keeps busy serving in the student government as a senator and supervising first-year students as a residential assistant. During the summer, she works at a summer camp for children with AIDS.

On Wednesday morning, though, Pilmer played the role of Lucia, a Sicilian young woman who was killed in AD 304 when her scorned prospective husband plunged a sword through her heart while she was being burned at the stake.

More specifically, Pilmer was trying to keep the candles from blowing out and the hot dripping wax from burning her ears.

“It’s not that hard at all,” Pilmer said after the ceremony, joking about asbestos hair spray. “You have to slow it down.”

According to tradition, Santa Lucia appeared after her death on a lake in Sweden, providing light and food during a famine in the long, dark Scandinavian winter.

“Let us all consider the light which we radiate into each others’ lives,” Pilmer, in her role as Lucia, told about 200 people gathered for the ceremony.

“I thought it was beautiful,” said Betty Hanson, whose husband, Ken, was serving as president of Cal Lutheran for the day after bidding for the prize in a fund-raising auction.

Pilmer also said she found the ceremony beautiful, but found meaning in it beyond aesthetics.

Lucia was a “ ‘90s woman,” Pilmer said. She noted that the reason the saint was burned at the stake was that she refused to be bullied into marriage by her prospective husband, a rich pagan, and instead decided to devote her life to the church.

“I think we would have been friends,” said Pilmer, who said she hopes to stay at Cal Lutheran and work as an administrator after graduation.