Best route to see Christmas lights? There’s a map for that

It may be a long-shot to expect Christmas in Burbank to be white. But at certain homes, it’ll certainly be bright. Burbank residents now have a tool to help them find those homes lit up for the holidays.

Courtesy of Jennifer Jackson Bloom

To help guide her and her friends’ families on a tour of decorated homes in the Burbank area, Jennifer Jackson Bloom created an online map highlighting routes that passed most, but not all of the entrants in the city’s 32nd Annual Holiday Outdoor Decorating Contest, plus a few perennial favorites.

“I put the routes together for what might be convenient,” she said, adding that some locations were a little too far out of the way.

Her map routes includes a marker for a house at the corner of Sparks and Oak Streets that Bloom said is typically decorated but wasn’t entered in this year’s contest, as well as one for a house on Florence Street where the decorations take up the whole lawn.

Bloom said she has a master’s degree in public health and has done work creating public health maps, so “it just makes sense to do a map.” Earlier this week, she shared a link to the map via Twitter so others could use it, too.

“It’s fabulous. A ton of people are using it right now,” Twitter user @BurbankMom replied, also calling it “fan flipping tastic!”

Bloom said now that she knows others like it, she plans to offer to make one next year for the Burbank Civic Pride Committee, which judges the holiday decorating contest.

Click here for a full list of participants in the city’s Holiday Decorating Contest.