SALT LAKE CITY — Whatever you call Emma Thatcher, do not call her the woman who saved Christmas Street.
Emma is 37, mother of Harry, George and Willa, wife of Levi — and the proud owner, along with the bank, of a house located on the far end of the 31 houses that make up Glen Arbor Street, aka Christmas Street.
Ever since 1947, the residents of Glen Arbor — located at 1500 East and 1745 South in Sugar House — have banded together to light and decorate their houses in full holiday splendor and hang a sign across the entrance to the cul de sac that proclaims you are now entering Christmas Street.
There’s no telling how many cars have circled the Glen Arbor loop in the past 77 years. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? What’s not to like? It’s free, it’s always open, it’s all about Christmas. Generations of Wasatch Front Utahns have made it a holiday tradition. People who came as kids now come as grandparents.
But last year, the sign broke.
And with inflation running rampant, no one knew how to cover the costs to get it fixed.
That’s when Emma stepped up. She’s the one who took on the cause. She’s the one who had the idea to reach out to the local television stations to solicit funds. She’s the one who personally went on camera to make the appeal.
The result was Glen Arbor’s own Christmas miracle when TV viewers from all over the valley chipped in more than $7,000 to repair the sign.
So, in that regard, she is the woman who saved Christmas Street.
But man does she cringe when you say that.
“I shouldn’t be singled out, it’s kind of embarrassing,” she protests, “And it wasn’t just me, there were a lot of others involved.”
Emma was one of many of the street’s residents who received word early last fall via the neighborhood text thread that something needed to be done about the sign or there would be no more Christmas Street.
The initial response was … silence.
“That message just sat there for, I don’t know, weeks,” remembers Emma. “It’s a vintage sign from 1947 that was going to need at least $1,500 to get fixed. The feeling was that this was more than the residents wanted to handle on their own. It was a crossroads. Do people care as much anymore?”
The question that hung in the silence was “Is this the end?
Was the Glen Arbor of the 2020s as into the Christmas spirit as the Glen Arbor of the 1940s, when the houses were new, filled with families enjoying the post-World War II boom?
Over the years, as the houses have remained relatively the same, the street’s composition has changed considerably. Now it’s a collection of renters, college students, a few older residents, a handful of Airbnbs and a smattering of younger families like the Thatchers.
Then Emma talked to Dick Burdett.
Dick is her next-door neighbor. “A little shy, but just the nicest guy,” is how she describes him. Dick’s in his 80s and has lived on Glen Arbor Street his entire life. He was a young boy when the Christmas Street tradition started in the 1940s — a veritable eye witness.
When Emma told Dick that the tradition was in jeopardy and might not continue, this was Dick’s response: “This is the most magical street in the world.”
With that, Emma had her marching orders.
She messaged on the neighborhood group thread: “If we come up with the funds is everyone OK if we keep this going?”
She received plenty of encouragement, along with comments like “I’m not sure how you’re going to do that.”
That’s when she had the brainstorm to email the TV stations.
KUTV did a spot, then Fox 13, then ABC4. Finally, KSL aired an on-location spot that was lengthier than the others.
After that, says Emma, “it was nonstop.”
For a solid 24 hours, donations poured in.
“The coolest thing about it was we didn’t get a single donation over $300,” she says. “Most of them were $50 or under. We raised $7,000 from hundreds of people that Christmas Street meant something to.”
That was enough to fix the sign, erect a new lighted pole at the end of the cul de sac for cars to drive around, place a wreath at every streetlight and put enough away in a savings account for future expenditures. (“Because,” says Emma, “that sign is going to break again.”)
This year, like every December since 1947, cars from all over the valley have made their annual pilgrimage to Christmas Street, oblivious to the threat to their tradition.
“We don’t have the flashiest lights by any means,” says Emma. “There are no lights connected to music, there’s no Griswold house. This is more like A Christmas Story (the movie); I mean somebody does have a leg lamp, which is pretty great. I think it’s a really nostalgic thing, this street. So many people associate it with their childhood. They come and they see that sign and it just brings back fond feelings of years ago. When you’re a kid, Christmas is magic, and that feeling stays with you forever.”
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
