Michael Holland and his wife, Anne Louise Bannon, built up an extensive collection of Christmas decorations, including heirlooms from their respective childhoods over the 27 years they lived in their Altadena home.
“We tried to buy a new ornament every year as part of our tradition,” Holland told the Guardian.
Those ornaments – along with the majority of the couple’s possessions – are now gone. Holland and Bannon’s home burnt down in the early hours of 8 January 2025.
This holiday season will look markedly different for Holland, Bannon and thousands of other Angelenos who were displaced by January’s devastating wildfires.
The Pacific Palisades fire was the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history, destroying 6,800 structures and killing 12 people. To the east, the Eaton fire devastated the neighborhood of Altadena, with 19 confirmed fatalities. More than 9,400 structures were destroyed across Altadena and neighboring Pasadena and Sierra Madre. Notably, the Eaton fire disproportionately affected Black homeowners in the area, with nearly half of the Black households destroyed or majorly damaged by the blaze, according to estimates from researchers at University of California, Los Angeles.
Holland, 64, and Bannon, 67, are currently living in an apartment in Pasadena, about 2 miles (3km) from the lot where their house stood. This holiday season, the couple is “starting from scratch”, Holland says.
They are planning on getting a small tree and placing it in the picture window on the side of their apartment.
“Maybe we’ll put some icicle lights across the window too,” he said. But there is no replacing the decades of memories that burned.
Jodie Ludwin and her family had just moved to the Pacific Palisades in September 2024 from England.
“Our aim was to be there for a while, maybe even forever,” she told the Guardian. Just a few months later, they were back in England, watching their former neighborhood become engulfed in flames on TV. “We had gone to LA with 15 huge suitcases and we came back with a carry-on suitcase for the five of us.”
Ludwin, 36, had a house in London to return to and is acutely aware of how fortunate her family has been throughout the process.
“People’s lifelong homes were there and they lost everything,” she said. “We’d only just moved there. I guess for us, it was more just like our American dream had died.”
This holiday season, Ludwin is focused on creating happier memories with her three children and husband in the UK. They booked a trip and will be spending Christmas with their extended family.
“It makes you realize that anything can be taken from you within a second,” she said.
Despite loss and heartache, the communities impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires are beginning to find reason to celebrate. In November, the first rebuilt home in the Pacific Palisades was officially completed. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass confirmed that the home had passed relevant safety inspections and was ready for occupants, saying in a statement: “The Palisades community has been through an unimaginable year, and my heart breaks for every family that won’t be able to be home this holiday season.”
“But today is an important moment of hope,” she added.
Melissa Merritt moved to Altadena in 2019 with her son, daughter and then husband. On the morning of 8 January, she recalled getting a call from her neighbor, Rich Rieber: “He said: ‘I’m standing in front of your house and it’s on fire. What do you want out of it?’”
Merritt, 44, and her kids had already evacuated to her mother’s house in Pasadena. She told Rieber where her important documents were, and then the call dropped. A few hours later, he called back.
“I got your files, and I also got the stuffed animals off the kids’ beds, and their bikes out of the garage,” she recalled him saying, through tears. “To not have to replace all those things has been amazing and the fact that my kids still have things that are meaningful to them is so special. He will always be that guy for our family.”
Currently, Merritt and her family are living in Pasadena. It has been a trying couple of years for her: in October 2023, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and was forced to take two semesters off from nursing school to undergo treatment. At the time of the fires, Merritt said that she was “still kind of putting the pieces back together”. She had recently gone back to school and was preparing for a major reconstructive surgery.
“In some ways I felt like I was better equipped to deal with [the fires] than other people, just because it was just adding one more thing to what had already been a really hellish year,” she said.
As the holiday season approaches, a specific regret has come up time and time again for Merritt.
“The one box that I wish that I had asked my neighbor to grab was the Christmas ornament box,” she said. “The loss of that one box just hurts more than most everything else.”
Over the past few months, Merritt has scoured eBay to find ornaments similar to the ones they lost.
“Having little bits that remind us of something that was has actually been really nice as we’ve been putting up our tiny little tabletop tree,” she said.
Come Christmas Day, Merritt and her kids will be flying across the Atlantic, as they embark on their first international trip to England.
“It’s a celebration of [her children’s] resilience, of finishing school, finishing cancer treatment,” she said. “We’re all so excited about it.”
