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In 2016, when Sarah first moved into Winterhaven — the midtown neighborhood known for its annual festival of holiday lights and displays — she hung up a few strings of lights and plugged in some inflatables.
The display was more or less the same by 2018, but then her family dog Ruby died that December.
“We already had our display up and we were just heartbroken. My son and I are so about animals and we were so distraught,” Sarah says. “She was so special. She had a great spirit, she was funny, she was devious. She was forgiving and kind and patient. I put something in the yard, an ‘in her memory’ kind of sign, and we had gotten a dog blowup that kind of looked like her.”
After the holidays that year, Sarah and her son started brainstorming — what else could they do to honor Ruby?
“It just came to me — her spirit was like, ‘Try to help animals. Do something to help animals,’” Sarah says.
The idea was clear: Sarah and her son wanted to put together a holiday display to help animals get adopted.
In 2019, she purchased more pet-themed inflatables and contacted both the Pima Animal Care Center (PACC) and Pima Paws for Life for help. That year, she asked both shelters if they could print photos of their adoptable pets and laminate the images — a decision she now calls naive after realizing how busy the staff and volunteers are.
“But this woman, I wish I remembered her name, from Pima Paws for Life just fell in love with the idea,” Sarah says. “She said, ‘I’m going to get pictures and laminate them and decorate them and drop them off.’ She made an entire shoebox of them. I didn’t know at the time just how huge that was.”
Sarah hung up the laminated pictures at her home on the corner of Windsor Street and Forgeus Avenue, allowing passersby to kneel down to look at the four-legged friends in need of families. She also made a display out of PVC pipes and hung hand-painted letters that read, “Yappy Holidays.”
When they decided to put up the animal displays that first year, Sarah made sure to split the yard in half to still include her son’s favorite inflatables. “My son was still young at the time and he was like, ‘That’s awesome — and what about all my blowups? I gotta have my blowups,’” she says.
The pandemic canceled the Winterhaven Festival of Lights in 2020, so Sarah’s pet-centric display made its return in 2021 and she started to make upgrades — instead of the hand-painted “Yappy Holidays” letters, she purchased lighted marquee-style letters which now read “Yappy Howlidays” over a vinyl banner. Over the years, she’s added other crafty touches like DIY lighted tennis balls and Christmas trees made out of recycled wood.
By 2022, she wanted the display to feel more interactive so she worked with Signarama to design a cutout for kids to take photos with.
“Sometimes there are lines of people,” Sarah says. “(The cutout) was intended for kids so it’s the sizing for kids to put their heads through, but I’ve seen adults, I’ve seen kids holding their big Golden Retriever’s head through it to take pictures. It’s adorable.”
Each holiday season, Sarah hears countless feel-good stories about the displays outside her home. She’s heard people look through the photos and say, “We need to go to PACC!” She’s watched as families talk in depth about the photos of the cats and dogs.
“Even if it saves one animal or five animals, it doesn’t matter. It just fits with the whole universal theme of making a difference for one person, for one human, for one animal,” Sarah says. “That is really what the goal has been. It’s a ton of work — this year, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’ But my son and I were talking about it and we were like, ‘No, I do want to do it’ because it’s so worth it and it just brings a lot of joy.”
Part of Sarah’s display includes three inflatable Boston Terriers in honor of the dogs who have been part of her family. Last year, she was walking her two Boston Terriers through the festival when a middle schooler ran toward her and said, “You gotta see this house up here. It looks like your dogs!”
“I just died laughing. I was like, ‘That is my yard!’” Sarah says. “It’s just little interactions with people where you see their appreciation. That’s part of it for Winterhaven, but then the other part is if people actually find an animal and go adopt, that just means everything. It fulfills the purpose of trying to celebrate our first dog. We’re just all about animals and anything we can do to get animals out of PACC or other places to find homes is our main priority.”
Though Sarah has been honoring Ruby and adoptable pets since 2019, she’s lived in Winterhaven for nearly a decade.
“I’ve lived in all different neighborhoods — west side, the Foothills. The thing (in Winterhaven) that you notice almost immediately is that you know your neighbors within a week,” she says. “There are other neighborhoods I’ve lived in where you might know your next-door neighbor and not many beyond that. Here, you just learn about other people, you get to be friends and people look out for each other.”
If you’re planning a trip to Winterhaven this year
The 76th Winterhaven Festival of Lights runs from 6-10 p.m. daily through Dec. 27 in the neighborhood west of Country Club, north of Fort Lowell, east of Tucson Boulevard and south of Prince. Find parking information here.
The festival is free to attend, though Winterhaven helps support the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. There are donation stations at every entrance — last year, $33,774 and 34,134 pounds of food were donated to the Food Bank during the festival.
There will be two drive-through nights, Dec. 15 and Dec. 17, for people in assisted living, memory care, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, disability service organizations and other programs that help people with mobility challenges. Registration is required and there is no fee. Find more information here.
You can walk through the neighborhood, reserve an Arizona Party Bike or join in on a silent-disco-meets-flash-mob with Silent Adventures. You’ll also find a handful of vendors inside the festival serving hot dogs, tacos, fried chicken, snacks and coffee.
For more information on this year’s festival, click here.
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