Their home beside Highway 12 is gone, but Christmas lives there even so

Like hope itself, Christmas flickers back to life along a bleakly charred strip of Sonoma Highway at the Santa Rosa end of the Valley of the Moon.

With their electrical service just restored, Nikki and Kevin Conant have arrayed and plugged in a playful, new, gratitude-themed holiday display where their home used to be. The festive lights, garlands, figures of Santa and elves, and tributes to firefighters stand in sharp relief to the Glass fire devastation that is all around right there, across the two-lane highway from the Oakmont senior community.

The Conants’ landlady, Terry Sochet, said of the couple’s up-from-the-ashes Christmas display, “I think it’s the spirit of the valley.”

Sochet intends to build new rentals to replace the four small studios, surrounded by more than 2 acres of gardens and bare land, that were homes for the Conants and their neighbors until the horrifying night of Sept. 27. “I’ve got to see what the county will let me do,” Sochet said.

The Conants say she’s an extraordinary landlady. They’re ever more convinced since Sochet learned that they were determined this year to continue their holiday tradition of creating a grand Christmas display on the property, even though their decorations were destroyed along with virtually everything else they owned.

Sochet went to the Home Depot and Lowe’s and asked for donations of holiday lights and inflatables and such for the Conants. The home improvement stores were generous. So have the people who’ve responded to a crowdfunding appeal to help the couple get back on their feet and to revive their business, which involves making furniture and all sorts of woodwork from the staves of used wine barrels.

“The people in this community are just amazing,” Nikki Conant, 52, said from the property Wednesday afternoon. She told of being astounded by how many people have stopped by to say they like the decorations, or have donated to them.

“It’s unbelievable, the love,” she said.

Both Sonoma County natives, Kevin, 53, and Nikki hoped that they were done with wildfires after the flames of October 2017 menaced their rural neighborhood. “I think the firefighters saved us as least twice” that time, Kevin said.

He and his wife recalled how, late the last Sunday night of this past September, flames crested the hills behind them and rushed in from two directions.

The Conants sprayed water on their home until the power went out, killing the water pump. As much as Nikki loved living there, she said, “I didn’t want to die here.”

Kevin started up a neighbor’s tractor and tried to halt the flames by cutting a firebreak, but the fire was too fierce.

“We stayed until the very last minute,” his wife said.

Close to midnight that Sunday, the two of them jumped into Kevin’s pickup and tried to pull onto Sonoma Highway. “It was bumper-to-bumper,” Nikki said.

She and Kevin had begun to fret that the flames would overtake them right there when at last they found a chance to turn onto the highway and head for Sonoma.

It was three days before they were able to return. Their worst fears hadn’t fully envisioned the extent of the devastation.

“It was like a part of me is gone,” Nikki said at the time. “Everything we built here, everything we made, is gone.”

She’d sobbed at the spot where their 12 chickens perished. A couple hundred wine barrels awaiting conversion in the Conant’s Wine Barrel Creations workshop were destroyed, as was the workshop.

Nikki and Kevin found a temporary rental in Glen Ellen. As they pondered and discussed what to do next, they quickly agreed on one thing.

“We can never leave Sonoma County,” Nikki said.

It did her and Kevin’s hearts good to hear from Sochet, the landlady, that she is determined to build new rental residences on the land. And she wants them to come back.

“Those two people are the best. Incredible tenants,” she said.

The holidays have always been a big deal to Nikki and Kevin.

Every year about now, they’ve treated themselves, their neighbors and passersby on Sonoma Highway to a bright and cheery Christmas display — candy canes, stars, trees, characters. The exhibit always filled the garden space between the studios and the roadway.

With every structure on the property incinerated and the remains scraped away, and with all else that has gone down this year, the Conants not long ago discussed whether to return and to again decorate the place for the holidays. They agreed that to dress the plot of land they love for Christmas is more important this year than ever before.

Days ago they set out bedazzled trees, the cutouts of a fire station and engine, figures of snowmen, Santa, reindeer, elves and much more, including a large banner that reads, “Thank you, firefighters! Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.”

The Conants then brought the entire scene alive with electrical power from a newly energized pole. Darkness fell, and some 12 weeks after the most terrifying and harshest day of their lives, the two of them took in the fully illuminated effect of what they’d created for Christmas 2020.

“It brought tears to our eyes,” Nikki Conant said. “We were so happy.

“It made the whole year.”