Filed under: Color, Fun Stuff, Holidays, Design, etc, House Tours
Meet "Mr. Christmas" and several other homeowners responsible for the most illuminating (and illuminated!) over-the-top Christmas decorations in the country.
There are only a handful of occasions when it's perfectly acceptable -- no, encouraged -- to leave your taste at home and bring on the tacky! Yep, 'tis the season for gawdy lawn ornaments, and lucky for you we've picked out a few of the best over-the-top Christmas displays in the country.
(Love Christmas Lights? Check out the video at Holidash.)
Here's what their creators have to say about why they do it, how many lights they use, and just how much their electric bill is every December.
Traffic is jammed along 34th Street in Baltimore as revelers take in the street of lights. Photo: Cory Brown, Flickr
Christmas Street, Baltimore, Maryland
"I could live on a dead-end street in the middle of the desert, and I'd still be doing this," says Bob Hosier, one of the original residents behind the "Christmas Street" tradition in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland.
Hosier and his wife of 28 years, Darlene Hughes, started the annual decorating extravaganza in 1982 at the 34th Street rowhouse that Darlene grew up in. Today, nearly all of the residents of the 700 block of West 34th Street, or "Christmas Street", bust out their best holiday decorations, creating a street of lights so bright it can probably be seen from outer space. Think: Hundreds of thousands of lights, menorahs, snow globes, wreaths, life-size Santa figurines and Grinches, a hubcap Christmas tree and a bicycle-wheel snowman -- oh, and did we mention that there are also crabs pulling a sled? (The crab is Maryland's mascot.)
It's only fitting that a display that lights up like the Las Vegas strip would draw a crowd -- and inspire a traffic jam. Insiders warn that the 34th Street traffic can be bumper to bumper around Christmas time. Pedestrians crowd the sidewalks and streets, dodging cars and the occasional tour bus that rolls through the neighborhood to check out the world class lights.
The exterior of Bob and Raquel Cox's house lit up at night. Photo: Bob & Raquel Cox
Steel City Christmas, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Forget lighting up the neighborhood! Some Christmas-light enthusiasts draw a crowd with just one over-the-top home.
Photo: Steel City Christmas Lights
Now six years old, Alyvia and her three year old sister Demetria still love the lights, as do the residents in and around the Pittsburgh area. Located in a cul-de-sac, the Cox home draws crowds of holiday enthusiasts who walk through the impressive light display. In the last few years, it has been expanded to include light-filled Christmas trees, archways, candy cane walkways and towers of twinkling snowflakes, among other things. In 2006, the Coxes began using a computer to set their lights to the soundtrack of holiday music.
Decorating their home for Christmas has become a year-round hobby. "The most lights we put up was last year at 265,000, but we downsized a little this year to only 150,000 lights," says Bob, who underwent back surgery over the summer, which kept him from dedicating as much time to the display. "We have a ton of lights in storage (somewhere around 500,000), and next year we plan on putting all of them up for our most extreme year yet." Rage on, Christmas warrior!
Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, New York
"Every Christmas, the Dyker Heights neighborhood turns into a sea of lights," says Tony Muia, owner and operator of A Slice of Brooklyn Bus Tours. As the story goes, Lucy Spata, the "Lucy" behind the "Lucy's Sausage & Peppers" started the trend of extreme decorating in the neighborhood. "I grew up with this," says Spata, a longtime Dyker Heights resident in the New York Daily News. "My mom was a fanatic, so some of it is her stuff to keep her memory alive." She begins putting the decorations, which include illuminated angels and large wooden soldiers, up in early November, and she keeps everything up until January.
When Spata first began decorating her home in the 1980s with hundreds of four-foot soldier figurines, reindeer and angels "in honor of her mother who loved angels," says Muia, the neighborhood complained about the crowds drawn by her displays. "If you don't like it," she told them, "Move!"
A drive through Brooklyn's Dyker Heights neighborhood is an enlightening experience. Photo: Tony Muia/A Slice of Brooklyn Bus Tours
And so the neighborhood joined in on the fun, and now, more than two decades later, everyone's getting in on the action, including local decorators and landscape artists. "Companies that were light on work in the winter realized that homeowners would gladly hire someone to help them deck out their home for the Dyker Heights display," says Muia. "Many residents have professionals come out to decorate, and then store the decorations until it's time to put them up again next year."
Residents of Dyker Heights aren't afraid to go bright on Christmas. Photo: Tony Muia/A Slice of Brooklyn Bus Tours
The Hyatt's home at 11201 NW 14th Street in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has been drawing crowds for five years. "My husband and I have been decorating our homes together since we got married back in 1990, but we bought this house specifically because we knew we could create a great Christmas display here," says Kathy Hyatt, 44. "My husband Mark's family always decorated the inside and outside of their house while he was growing up here in south Florida, and now he's carrying on that tradition. My family, on the other hand, was only able to put up a small tree, so it's been fun for me to learn how to decorate and build the display."
Team Hyatt's masterpiece in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Photo: Michael Zimmerman Photography
Team Hyatt takes their job decorating their home seriously. Photo: Courtesy of Kathy Hyatt
Tacky Light Tour, Richmond, Virginia
Spanning across multiple neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia, the Tacky Light Tour is a driving tour, designed to make it easy for holiday enthusiasts to find the craziest lights in town. Local residents can register their own home on the site to be included in the tour (there are 80 this year). Fair warning: Your home needs to boast at least 20,000 lights to be worthy of such an honor. Each listing provides a wealth of information, including the number of lights, the number of animated displays, the number of inflatable displays, the hours that the lights are turned on, and the number of years that home has been on the Christmas Tacky Light Tour.
Photo: Adam Sowers, Flickr
Frank Hudak (aka Mr. Christmas) with Matt Burgess, founder of TackyLightTour.com Photo: Tacky Light Tour
Can't get enough Christmas lights? Check out these over-the-top displays.
