Davis Downtown Annual Window Decorating Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Davis Downtown Annual Window Decorating Contest and who runs it?

Davis Downtown is the business association for downtown Davis, California, and the Annual Window Decorating Contest is its holiday showcase for the city's storefronts. The association's site carries the furniture of a formal organization: an About DDBA section, Board and Staff pages, Agendas & Meeting Information, a Business Directory, a business map and parking guidance. Its contact point is [email protected], and its office sits at 826 Second Street, Davis, CA 95616.

The contest invites passers-by to, in the page's own words, "Experience the sparkle of the season with beautifully decorated storefronts!" and to stroll downtown taking in the creative displays. Winners are settled by visitors rather than appointed judges: every participating business carries its own vote control on the event listing. Hosting stays in-house as well, because the ballot runs on the association's own domain, davisdowntown.com, with no outside polling service attached, so browsing and voting both happen inside the organizer's site.

Program facts at a glance

Item	Detail
Organizer	Davis Downtown
Program	Davis Downtown Annual Window Decorating Contest
Place	Downtown Davis, California
Ballot page	https://davisdowntown.com/event/annual-window-decorating-contest/
Host	The organizer's own website
Decision method	Public vote, a control per participating storefront
Contact	[email protected], 826 Second Street, Davis, CA 95616

When did the contest run and which edition is confirmed?

The association's event calendar carried the contest from December 1, 2025 through December 31, 2025, and that listing now displays a passed-event notice. Within the span, the contest page fixed the voting dates in its own words: "Voting Opens: December 6 (just in time for Pictures in the Plaza!) Voting Closes: December 31." The opening date was therefore timed to the plaza gathering named in the parenthesis. In the association's calendar the listing sits between a Davis Downtown Board Meeting entry and a Holiday Hunt event.

On origins, a write-up published by Abaton Consulting credits Stewart Savage, formerly executive director of the Davis Downtown Business Association, with creating the contest in 2012 to bring life and excitement to the downtown core. That account lives outside the organizer's own pages; the run the event listing itself establishes is 2025.

This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Neither the calendar entry nor the contest page publishes a category roster or a stated ceiling on repeat votes.

Timeline of the 2025 window

Stage	Date	Notes
Calendar listing	December 1, 2025	Event window opens on the association's calendar
Voting opens	December 6, 2025	Paired with the plaza event named on the page
Voting closes	December 31, 2025	Final day of the window
Results announcement	Not stated	The event page gives no announcement date

How does a supporter cast a vote for a downtown window?

Casting a vote happens on a single page of the association's site. A supporter opens the event listing, scrolls to the participating storefronts and presses the VOTE NOW control beside the business whose window deserves the backing. Entries are compact: the page's own text shows a pizza business at 238 G St with its VOTE NOW control directly beside the address, so every listing pairs a storefront and its button in a single line.

What the vote control does and does not settle

The control sits on a standard web page, not inside an app or a login-gated portal, and the listing shows no sign-in step, so a phone browser behaves like a desktop one. Planners get a small convenience too: the listing offers add-to-calendar exports for Google Calendar, iCalendar, Outlook 365 and Outlook Live. Frequency is the open question: nothing printed on the page says whether a supporter may come back day after day or must wait between visits, and eligibility terms are absent as well. Readers wanting background on ballots of this shape can compare notes in this site's award-vote overview, which covers how organizer-hosted votes differ from platform-hosted ones.

How does this ballot sit beside other California public-vote programs?

California holds several of this site's community choice programs, and the closest kin of the Davis storefront ballot sit in its best-of sibling set: first Best of Central Valley Business, then Best of Marin, followed by Best of Orange County, joined by the paired San Diego pages under Best of San Diego & Best Restaurants, rounded off with Best of Silicon Valley and finally the 2024 GGBR Calendar Contest. Every sibling shares the best-of vertical, settled by public votes rather than panels, and each keeps its own calendar, so none overlaps the December window that governs downtown Davis storefront voting.

The differences matter more than the similarities. Those programs cover wide regions and long lists of local categories, while the Davis contest concentrates on a single walkable district and a seasonal subject, decorated holiday windows. Hosting separates them too: davisdowntown.com serves this vote directly under its own roof instead of lending the ballot to a media title or bolting it onto an outside polling service, which makes the Davis page the most neighborhood-scale entry of the set and the least dependent on external ballot software. For a Davis supporter, that means the outcome rests almost entirely on local foot traffic and word of mouth rather than on a publication's reach.

Sibling program	Vertical	Page
Best of Central Valley Business	best-of	/usa/california/best-of-central-valley-business/
Best of Marin	best-of	/usa/california/best-of-marin/
Best of Orange County	best-of	/usa/california/best-of-orange-county/
Best of San Diego & Best Restaurants	best-of	/usa/california/best-of-san-diego-and-best-restaurants/
Best of Silicon Valley	best-of	/usa/california/best-of-silicon-valley/
2024 GGBR Calendar Contest	best-of	/usa/california/california-2024-ggbr-calendar-contest/

How can a Davis storefront pull in more support during the window?

The contest's format dictates what support can achieve. Because voting stays open on the association's event page across a month-long December stretch, exposure depends on moving supporters to that single address early; a storefront that waits until the final days forfeits most of its runway. Tactics that fit the format are straightforward: mention the vote control to customers while they stand in the shop, post the event link alongside a photo of the finished window, and concentrate pushes around busy downtown moments such as the Pictures in the Plaza opening day. Davis Downtown prints no statement about outside voting help on the event page, so a business weighing paid support should weigh the association's silence as part of the decision; this site's guide to earning more votes online collects approaches suited to organizer-hosted ballots.