Christmas spirit comes tumbling into town

Out here in northern Yorba Linda, where city starts looking like country, a giant tumbleweed is moored on a rocky embankment in a vacant lot. Neighbors differed on whether it’s been there for a few months or a few years -- so accustomed are they to seeing it -- but they agreed on one thing: It was an eyesore.

Until, that is, a few weeks ago when two 17-year-old El Dorado High School girls drove by it for the umpteenth time and decided to spread some Christmas cheer. What better way, they thought, than to spruce up the unsightly thing at the corner of Avocado and Oriente.

“We were driving by after school, and we just thought it looked so ugly,” Kaitlyn Hillquist says. “We thought, let’s decorate it.”

So Kaitlyn and Holli Powers went to a 99¢ store and bought a few red bulbs and a garland. They figured they’d add some baubles in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and that would be their good deed.

They’ve done much more than they imagined.

It may be too sappy to say the girls’ singular act of holiday spirit has touched a neighborhood, but we have some evidence.

The proof is that the tumbleweed monster -- measuring about 10 feet high at its peak and some 40 to 50 feet around -- is decked out in full-frontal Christmas regalia.

But Holli and Kaitlyn didn’t do it. As neighbors saw the results of the girls’ original effort, they stopped by the corner and added their own touches: a star, a Santa hat, some more bulbs, some more garlands, some flocking, a “Merry Christmas” banner.

Sometimes, if someone were adding a decoration, a driver would go by and honk and wave. A woman in a nearby cul-de-sac says everyone in the circle donated something.

No one was more surprised than the girls at what they started. “We definitely thought it would just be me and Holli who decorated it,” Kaitlyn says.

Lest you think this is just a “girl thing,” meet Ron Guidry, 72. “Once I saw what they’d started,” he says, “I felt it was my turn to jump in. I thought it was a neat idea, whoever started it, and it looked like it was being added to daily, so why not put my two bits in, too?”

He added a wreath and a garland.

Guidry pulled up to the lot while I was there Monday morning. With his tape measure we determined that the tumbleweed is roughly 50 feet in circumference, with “roughly” being the operative word because the sloping terrain and the sharp brambles make measuring it a less-than-precise task.

I’d first scouted the thing Sunday afternoon, but something looked different Monday morning. Aha, someone had added an angel in the back, capturing the look of a traditional top-of-the-tree adornment.

Just another anonymous donor, I figure, until Karen Lawyer, a 13-year-old Yorba Linda Middle School student, happens by and begins adjusting some decorations. “Every day, I add something,” she says. I mentioned the angel hadn’t been there the day before, and she said her mom and dad helped her make it Sunday night, by sewing a dress on a doll and fashioning its plastic wings.

It turns out to be, to my eye, the perfect finishing touch.

I don’t want to make too much of decorating a giant weed. But the greater disservice would be to make too little of it.

I see the girls’ simple act as symbolic of something larger: They could have done nothing, but instead chose to do something.

That something turned out to make many people happy and feel connected to a neighborhood or a cause, if you will, that unified people. Not unified in a grand sense, but in a way that made them feel good, all trying to turn ugliness into something if not beautiful, at least not so ugly.

That transcends the generations. I already mentioned 72-year-old Guidry. How about 3-year-old Molly Arii?

“We saw someone putting an ornament on while we were driving by,” says Molly’s mother, Mo, “and my daughter said, ‘Look, they’re decorating a Christmas tree.’ I said, ‘That’s not a Christmas tree, it’s a Christmas tumbleweed.’ ”

Little Molly insisted that the family also add to the tree. And since that day, they have.

Three-year-old Molly had the same idea as 72-year-old Ron.

“It’s something that when you drive by, it brings a smile,” Mo Arii says. “Our little Christmas tumbleweed.”

It’s premature to say Holli and Kaitlyn, both El Dorado seniors, have created a tradition. For one thing, no one knows how long the tumbleweed will be there.

From what research I could do, the thing is most likely a conglomeration of various tumbleweeds, because individual ones don’t grow anywhere near that large.

Not that it matters.

If the thing blew away tomorrow, Holli and Kaitlyn already have left their mark.

“We’re pleasantly surprised,” Kaitlyn says.

“We’re thankful,” Holli adds.

For what? “That people wanted to get involved. Especially at Christmastime, when everybody is so busy and caught up in the hustle and bustle.”

Pretty cool idea, I tell the girls.

Don’t they know it.

“We’re proud,” Holli says, with a grin. “It’s our baby.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.