Smith: Christmas lights brightened Petaluma schoolkids’ morning

Before classes let out for the holidays, Petaluma school bus driver Angela Ibleto and her passengers marveled twice daily over the elaborate Christmas decorations on a home just off Ely and Corona roads.

They wondered: How great would the house and yard look with the lights turned on? As the bus wended toward Kenilworth Junior High and Casa Grande High in the early morning and back toward home in mid-afternoon, the lights always were off.

Between her bus shifts, Ibleto works with her dad, Angelo, at his Petaluma meat shop. Two days before the schools’ year-end vacation, she ran errands for Angelo’s Meats and found herself near the grandly decorated house on Hartman Lane.

Obeying an impulse, she stopped. She told the man who lives there, “I know you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

From there she told him she’s a school-bus driver who’s been passing by his darkened display twice a day with a bunch of intrigued kids. Please, would he switch on the light for them the following morning, the last day of school before the break, when they pass by at 7:20?

“I don’t think so,” he grimaced. “I don’t get up that early.”

But then he softened a bit, agreeing to arise early the next day and hit the lights.

As the bus approached Hartman Lane at about 7:20 a.m., rain pounded. Then the house came into the view of all aboard Ibleto’s bus, and this fabulous flood of festive light displaced the soggy gloom.

Ibleto’s jaw already had dropped when the bus drew close enough for her to see that the man stood there in his yard.

“And he was holding a sign that said, ‘Merry Christmas.’ In the rain!”

Ibleto stopped and carried him the gift of beef jerky that she’d intended just to leave at his door. As kids shouted thanks and well-wishes from lowered bus windows, she told him he’d made their Christmas.

He replied, “You know what? You made mine.”

ANOTHER FELLOW, this one named H.C. Jackson, felt his heart melt as he watched a team of street-level philanthropists present gifts Tuesday to 75 children at the Family Support Center, Catholic Charities’ downtown Santa Rosa shelter for homeless families.

Jackson had donated $1,000 to the gift program, led each year by Janis “JJ” Jordan, who mounts big yard sales to raise most of the money for the Christmas buying.

Jackson, a retired hardware retailer, watched the homeless children give thanks for their presents, then he remarked that he needed to do something. And he wrote Catholic Charities a check for $2,000.

THIS CRIME really got to sheriff’s deputy Greg Meyers.

It crushed three Rio Nido boys - twins and a neighbor - to find that all of their bikes were stolen from a carport.

Meyers went to colleague Joe Dulworth, a leader of the Sonoma County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, who broadcast a plea to active and retired members. In streamed more than $600.

At The Bike Peddler in Santa Rosa, Jim Keene gave deputies a super deal on three BMX bikes, helmets and locks.

Then he donated two more bikes and essential accessories.

Deputies who delivered the three bikes to the Rio Nido boys expect little trouble locating kids deserving of the other two.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.