The Shape of a Holiday Season
Tree lightings, pop-up shops, and neighborhood squares reveal how a city comes to recognize itself.
As the holidays edge closer, Bakersfield begins to take on a certain kind of glow. Lights thread themselves through trees and rooftops, music permeates public squares, and neighbors find themselves in the same spaces, lingering a little longer than usual. What emerges is the choreography of community.
Much of that choreography has, over the years, been shaped quietly by Bolthouse Properties, a company that has made a practice of cultivating the kinds of places where tradition can take root.
This season, as in years past, Bakersfield residents will gather in settings designed less for transaction than connection. On Saturday, December 6, The Shoppes at Seven Oaks Business Park will host its Holiday Pop-Up Shop, a five-hour occasion that braids together shopping, music, and play. Families will wander past stalls stocked by local businesses, children will sit elbow-to-elbow at craft tables, and Santa (between 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM) will pose for photographs that cost nothing but attention. The event is equal parts commerce and ritual, a chance to discover new goods while stitching another memory into the fabric of family holidays.
A few days later, on Thursday, December 11, Belcourt Village will stage its first annual Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony. The celebration is, by design, communal. Students from local schools provide the soundtrack, their voices carrying across the plaza as the tree comes to life. The moment is a collective pause, a recognition that such traditions, however brief, reaffirm the sense that Bakersfield is a community bound by shared pride.
For Bolthouse Properties, the staging of these events point to a larger ambition. The company’s developments (retail centers, parks, neighborhood squares), are conceived as backdrops for life, places where milestones are marked and memory accrues. More than two-thirds of the businesses across their retail properties are locally owned. It’s an ethos. To shop here is to keep dollars within the city, to reinforce Bakersfield’s entrepreneurial spirit, and to underwrite the viability of family-run enterprises.
So this December, whether you’re browsing the Pop-Up Shop or standing in the crowd at Belcourt Village as the tree is illuminated, bear in mind that the moment is larger than the event itself. It’s part of a pattern, one that continues to build Bakersfield’s collective memory, quietly, insistently, year after year.
Learn more about the Bolthouse Properties vision at BolthouseProperties.com.