The Best Christmas Lights in America

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.

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.

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!"

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments