Best Lights in Citrus Heights: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Best Lights in Citrus Heights contest and who runs it?

Best Lights in Citrus Heights is a holiday lights competition run by the City of Citrus Heights, a California city that hosts the program on its own municipal website. The city describes the contest as a celebration of the holiday spirit of residents as they decorate for the season, one that brings together neighbors, officials and staff each December. It began in 2019, which makes the 2026 cycle the latest entry in a run that has spanned the last seven winters.

The structure is unusual among California fan ballots. Instead of ranking restaurants, businesses or personalities, the ballot honors decorated residences and streets. Neighbors nominate each other for one of the award categories, a public vote settles the winners, and every nominee and category winner receives a yard sign to display at their residence. No cash purse and no media feature attach to the prize.

Category names printed for 2025 give a feel for the thing: GRISWOLD, for the brightest and most impactful display of shining lights, awarded that year to 6099 Peoria Dr.; HOLIDAY VILLAGE, for the best-decorated block or neighborhood working together, awarded to Creekcrest Cir.; and WINTER WONDERLAND, described on the ballot as the "Chilliest display of icicles". Further names appear on the live page for each cycle.

The city's website also offers personal accounts for managing notification subscriptions and saving form progress, which is standard municipal portal tooling; whether the lights ballot itself requires a sign-in is taken up further down this page.

Which editions are confirmed and when does the 2026 window run?

The program is annual. Four recent winters carry confirmed editions, 2023, 2024, 2025 and the 2026 cycle now sitting on the city's site, while the city's own history places the first competition in 2019, so the current year sits deep inside a tradition rather than at its start.

The 2026 schedule printed on the city's page splits December into three stages. Nominations open November 30 and close December 7. Community voting runs December 8 to December 15. Yard sign pick up at City Hall begins December 16, once the results are settled.

One address shows how steady the custom has become: the Citrus Heights Sentinel reported that a home on Karen Rae Court collected nominations in every cycle from 2020 through 2025, six straight winters of appearing on the same city ballot.

Two gaps in the published material matter to anyone planning a serious effort. Nothing on the page caps how many times a single supporter may vote, nor spells out who is eligible to nominate or cast a ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Day-by-day dates for the 2023, 2024 and 2025 cycles are likewise absent from the current page, and no outside platform promotes this contest, so there is no second schedule to reconcile with the city's own.

How does a supporter actually vote in the Citrus Heights lights contest?

The three stages of a cycle

Everything happens on one page of the municipal site. From November 30 to December 7, residents submit nominations for neighboring displays through the contest page. Once community voting opens on December 8, supporters return to the same Best Lights page, look over the nominated homes and blocks, and cast a public vote for a favorite before the window shuts on December 15. The contest section of the site also includes a map view of displays, which helps a voter plan an evening drive-by before settling on a choice.

No separate polling service sits between the voter and the ballot: the vote takes place on citrusheights.net itself, under the city's own header and navigation. Personal accounts exist on the portal, but they serve notification subscriptions and saved form progress around city services, and the ballot page does not state that signing in is required to participate.

After voting closes, the sequence moves offline. Staff hand out yard signs at City Hall on Fountain Square Drive beginning December 16, which closes the loop on that winter's contest until the next nomination form goes live.

How does this ballot sit beside its California neighbours?

What makes the Citrus Heights ballot different

Several other California ballots share the best-of space with this one. Best of Silicon Valley, Best of Orange County, Best of Marin, Best of Central Valley Business and the 2024 GGBR Calendar Contest all run in the state, alongside Best of San Diego & Best Restaurants. Those are region-scale polls in which businesses, services and venues compete for favor, usually run by publishers rather than by governments.

Best Lights in Citrus Heights is the municipal government production of the group, and the only one whose nominees are private homes and whole streets rather than commercial entrants. Scale and rhythm differ too: the publisher polls run long cycles tied to annual readership awards, while the Citrus Heights ballot compresses everything into a tight December stretch of one nomination week, one voting week, and yard signs by the middle of the month.

Its reward is physical and hyper-local, a sign planted in a front yard on a residential court, not a badge on a business listing. For a supporter that changes the playing field entirely: competing here means mobilizing a handful of neighbors on a named street rather than rallying a broad customer base, and the Holiday Village category builds cooperation between adjacent houses into the contest itself.

How can a nominee strengthen support in this contest?

Three levers fit this ballot's shape. First, win the nomination week: displays enter contention only if someone puts them forward between November 30 and December 7, so a household that waits for the voting stage to appear on the ballot may never be listed at all. Second, think in blocks, because the Holiday Village category rewards a street that decorates as a unit, and a coordinated row of houses gives every individual home more visibility during the voting week. Third, make the display legible at night, since voters deciding from the car rely on brightness and clarity along a dark court.

The city's page does not print a position on organized or purchased voting help, so any supporter weighing outside assistance should weigh it against the neighbor-to-neighbor character of the event. General tactics for widening a public vote's reach, from timing to outreach, are collected in our guide to getting more votes online.