Holiday lights go big this year

Pandemic-bound homeowners got to work earlier than usual this holiday season, spending much more time and money on outside decorations than in previous years.

Normally, the day after Thanksgiving is the unofficial start of the holiday light display season, but this year, it bumped up to the day after Halloween.

Sales of string lights were up 194% in October 2020 from October 2019, according to a 1010data holiday report. Lowes reported an increased and early demand for string-lights, fresh-cut trees, wreaths and greenery. And professional holiday decorators reported getting calls from new and returning customers as early as August.

“This year was completely insane. We can’t keep up with it,” said Richard Johns, the owner of Christmas Decor of New Jersey, which installs residential and commercial holiday displays. Business has been complicated by supply shortages and social distancing rules. “It’s been crazy.”

In a typical year, Johns receives about 20 calls a day during the peak period, which runs from around the second week of November through the first week of December. This year, some days averaged over 100 calls, with the company still getting 20 calls a day well into December, a time when work would normally be done for the year. In mid-December, two days before a major winter storm threatened to dump more than 1 foot of snow on northern New Jersey, three new customers hired the company to put lights on their houses. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Johns said.

New customers wanted to do something special and longtime ones wanted to go bigger, with some homeowners spending as much as $15,000 to light up their properties. A typical Christmas Decor customer spends about $2,500.

“They’re not taking Caribbean vacations, Disney vacations,” Johns said. “They’re all home and so they decided to decorate.”

Even Netflix seems inspired by the moment with a new reality series, “Holiday Home Makeover with Mr Christmas,” starring Benjamin Bradley as the lovable interior designer eager to help homeowners channel their inner tinsel and garland to make their homes sparkle.

The show was filmed in 2019, before the pandemic, but seems poised for this moment, where homeowners are anxiously looking for any way to brighten up their days. “We’ve all been dealing with a year where there is just almost no ability to plan and no ability to foresee what the future is bringing,” said Bradley, in a telephone interview. And so we’re motivated to do “anything that’s familiar, that keeps us tethered to reality.”

This year Matt Carino, 23, an assistant to the principal designer at an architectural lighting design company in Manhattan, decided to overhaul the display on his family’s home in Montclair, New Jersey. Last year, he covered the six-bedroom house that he has been decorating since he was 8 years old in red, white and green twinkling lights. But given the mood of the country, he wanted a look that was “a little bit more sophisticated and little bit more magical,” he said.

Carino, who put up lights last spring to lift his neighbours’ spirits, started work on this year’s holiday display in September, toiling from 8 am to 3 am on Saturdays and long hours on Sundays to get it ready by Dec 1. “This year it had to happen, even though there’s a lot going on and it was a long process to get it going,” he said. “As a person who works in the entertainment business, I needed that creative outlet and I really wanted to give back to the community.”

Now, the house and lawn are bathed in a field of 100,000 tiny white bulbs. A series of arches create a lit canopy down the long driveway and a white star shines above the house’s roofline. The display is a neighbourhood draw, with visitors lingering to watch a 30-foot tree on the property change colour in a 10-minute loop. “There are waves of people, there are some points where there is absolutely no one out there,” Carino said. “And there are some points where I walk outside and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I hope my neighbours are OK with this.’”

With few places to go this year, families are spending their hours driving around looking at lights. Timothy Gay, 59, has seen three times as many visitors to the display at his house in Dutchess County, New York, than in previous years. His light show, a Guinness Book of World Records holder with 670,000 bulbs, typically attracts tourists who drive through a loop on his 1.7-acre property in LaGrangeville, which is within the town of Union Vale, about two hours north of New York City.

Normally, the crowds get heavy in the days before Christmas, where the wait can be an hour and a half long, with cars backed up for miles, a phenomenon that baffles Gay, an engineer. “Why would anybody do that? I’d turn around in a heartbeat,” said Gay, who uses his home’s popularity to raise money for various charities, raising more than $400,000 over the years. “I hate waiting for anything.”

This year, hundreds of cars started gathering the weekend after Thanksgiving, with roughly 500 vehicles visiting on a Thursday night in early December. By mid-December, there were thousands of cars a night, with local constables helping to direct traffic. “I think people are just trying to boost themselves a little bit in this difficult year,” Gay said. “It’s been such a dark year, which makes a light display even brighter.”

This might be a banner year for lights, but for those who live alongside the boldest displays, a solid month of revelry can be a bit much. James Spica, 62, who lives across the street from Gay’s property, has an unobstructed view from his bedroom window of a display that he likens to the Las Vegas Strip. “I’m in the woods with deer, foxes, hawks, it’s beautiful,” he said of his 9-acre property, which he moved to 30 years ago from the Bronx. “If I look out the other window, I see the Macy’s Day parade, it’s pretty different.”

For the past two years, Spica has been away during the holidays, one year in Barcelona and another year at a yoga retreat. But this year, because of the pandemic, he’s homebound, and dreading the light show, which is accompanied by a musical soundtrack synchronised with the changing lights. Visitors tune their FM dials to a low-power radio station programmed by the Gay family that plays the prerecorded music that the lights are choreographed to. Spica can hear it emanating as cars open their windows to get a better view of the show.

“I don’t want to be the Grinch that stole Christmas,” said Spica, who is retired from a career in telecommunications. “It must make some people feel happy to come see this ridiculous thing, but it doesn’t make me feel happy.”

“The neighbours are split, a lot of them love it,” said Betsy Maas, the town supervisor for Union Vale, noting all the money raised for local charities. “But the traffic is a pain in the neck.”

Gay said that over the years, a handful of neighbours have complained to the town about the display, mostly raising concerns about traffic. “There have been a couple of people who have tried to get the town to take steps that are literally beyond their jurisdiction,” he said. “There is really no basis to tell somebody they can’t have Christmas lights” on private residential property.

In Dyker Heights, a Brooklyn neighbourhood known for its over-the-top holiday displays, the mood is mixed this year, with some homeowners decorating bigger and brighter and others scaling back in an attempt to keep the crowds of tourists away. Holiday light installers say that business has been down in Dyker Heights, but up in neighbourhoods that don’t usually attract the light-peeper, like Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill.

“People who ordinarily wouldn’t do it are doing it more and finding the money to celebrate,” said James Bonavita, CEO of B & R Christmas Decorators in Brooklyn, which designs and installs light displays and has seen a boon in business from owners of smaller homes with smaller budgets.

But not everyone in Dyker Heights is toning it down. Lucy Spata, 64, who has lived on 84th Street in Dyker Heights since 1986 and is credited with starting the tradition, began decorating her house with an array of toy soldiers in October, turning them on before Thanksgiving.

“The children don’t have anything to look forward to. They can’t go see Santa Claus. Even the Thanksgiving Day parade they couldn’t enjoy,” said Spata, who added more soldiers to the display in front of her semidetached row house. “The children needed something, even the adults, too, they needed something to enjoy when they go outside.”

But some neighbours complained that the lights would bring crowds to a neighbourhood that gets so overrun with tourists that some knock on the doors of homeowners asking to use their bathrooms. But Spata was not deterred by the naysayers. “A lot of people complained when I started decorating here, saying some people have no consideration,” she said. “What does corona have to do with Christmas lights? People are walking outside with masks. I’m not having coffee with them or cake. I said nobody bosses me or my house, so I just went bigger.”

With tourism down in New York, Dyker Heights may indeed have a respite this year, especially as tour bus operators have cancelled their routes amid the pandemic. “There is probably a sense of relief that buses are not going to be coming,” said Tony Muia, owner of A Slice of Brooklyn Bus Tours, whose company will not run Dyker Heights holiday tours this season. (In years past, the bus company would bring in four or five buses a night, full of 56 passengers, mostly domestic and international tourists, shuttling them from Union Square to Dyker Heights.)

Without as many tourists crowding the streets, Muia, who lives in nearby Bensonhurst, hopes this year might feel more like past years, before word got out, saying, “As someone who grew up with the tradition, this year may be a nice quiet year for everyone.”

c.2020 The New York Times Company