Every December, the stretch of Hillside Avenue between Selwyn Avenue and Westfield Road fills with color that has nothing to do with string lights. Neighbors here make their own ornaments: chicken wire bent into spheres, wound through with LED strands, then hoisted into the tree canopy until the branches look like they're holding dozens of glowing planets. Traffic backs up most nights just to look at them. It has for fourteen years now, and the reason it hasn't stopped has less to do with holiday spirit than with a rule written into a Girl Scout handbook.
In 2012, Mason Schmitt was a junior at Myers Park High School working toward her Gold Award, Girl Scouting's highest honor, which requires a service project with real staying power. She noticed what her neighbors already knew: the homemade light balls on her street were already pulling bumper-to-bumper traffic every night in December. All that was missing was a bin for canned food. She put one out for Loaves & Fishes, set a goal of 10,000 pounds of donations, and ended up with closer to 18,000.
A Sustainability Clause, Not a Suggestion
What makes Hillside Avenue's tradition different from most neighborhood light displays isn't the chicken wire. It's the fine print of the award Mason was chasing. A Gold Award project has to be sustainable, meaning it has to survive after the student who built it moves on. That single requirement forced a decision most neighborhood traditions never have to make. The families on Hillside Avenue had to formally agree, in Mason's final year of high school, that they would keep the food drive running once she left for college.
They did. One neighbor a few doors up, Jodi Hummer, turned that promise into a ritual of its own: an annual ball-making party every November, where most of the households on the street gather to bend wire and string lights before the season starts. What began as one teenager's homework assignment became a piece of the block's actual culture, the kind of thing residents plan their November calendar around rather than something a single family maintains on their own initiative.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Plenty of Charlotte streets have one house that goes all out for the holidays, and plenty of those displays fade when the family that started them moves or loses interest. Hillside Avenue built the handoff into its founding document. The tradition wasn't designed to be a monument to one Girl Scout project. It was designed to keep going without her.
The Numbers Don't Match, and That's the Point
Tracking exactly how much the drive collects each year is harder than it sounds, partly because organizers count food pounds, cash, and checks together, and partly because the totals simply climbed as the tradition aged. In an early season, the count landed around 18,000 pounds. A few years later, a season's haul was reported at three to four tons of physical food plus enough cash and checks to push the total value past the equivalent of 22,000 pounds. By a more recent count, a single December brought in more than 75,000 pounds.
Those figures come from different years, different reporting methods, and probably different definitions of what counts as a pound. None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is the direction. A project that started with a homemade bin and a homemade goal of 10,000 pounds has, by any of these counts, grown by several multiples over the same years the neighborhood kept insisting the tradition stay small, informal, and resident-run. Nobody incorporated it. Nobody hired an event planner. It scaled anyway, on the strength of neighbors who show up in November to bend wire into spheres because that's simply what the street does now.
Drivers have been known to roll a window down and hand over cash without stopping the car, according to one of the founding organizers. That kind of spontaneous generosity is easier to picture on a street where the lights themselves are the product of dozens of households' labor rather than one homeowner's electric bill.
What You'll Actually Find on Hillside Avenue
The display runs every night in December, with no single opening event and no ticket. The concentration of light balls is heaviest on Hillside Avenue itself, between Selwyn Avenue and Westfield Road, though the style has spread into a few neighboring streets over the years. Donation bins sit out for non-perishable food, and the drive still benefits Loaves & Fishes, now part of the merged nonprofit Nourish Up, which lists the Hillside Holiday Hunger Drive Through on its event calendar each year with the same simple ask: drive by, look at the lights, and leave something for the pantry.
A few things worth knowing before you go:
- There's no set night. The display and the donation collection run throughout December, so there's no single evening you need to catch.
- Cash and checks count too. The bins aren't limited to canned goods, which is part of why the totals have grown past what food alone would suggest.
- Parking is residential. This is a lived-in street, not an event lot, so the usual courtesies apply: don't block driveways, and keep the visit to a slow drive or a short walk rather than a long stay.
- Volunteers are still welcome most seasons, whether that means singing carols, greeting cars, or helping sort donations, and sign-ups are typically posted through Nourish Up's event page closer to the season.
A Street That Decided Not to Let It End
The chicken-wire balls are what get photographed and what shows up on every roundup of Charlotte's best Christmas lights each December. What those roundups tend to skip is the reason the display is still there at all. Mason Schmitt aged out of the project by design. Her mother, Anne Schmitt, stayed involved. Jodi Hummer built the annual party that keeps the wire-bending tradition alive block by block. None of that was optional once the Gold Award's sustainability requirement made survival part of the assignment.
Fourteen years later, Hillside Avenue is still the address people mean when they say they're going to look at Christmas lights in Myers Park. The lights are the visible part. The part that actually explains why they're still burning is a promise a street full of neighbors made to a graduating senior, and never got around to breaking.
If you're already circling Hillside Avenue every December and find yourself wondering what else makes this pocket of Myers Park worth paying attention to beyond the holidays, Katie Harrison would love to talk through it with you. Let's Connect.
