Decorating your home with Christmas lights is a holiday tradition, but dealing with burned-out bulbs and tangled wires is a hassle. But imagine if you had to hang, staple and power up thousands or even millions of lights.
A row of houses nestled in the corner of southwest Mesa by Cherry Street and Guadalupe Road light up the night with their holiday displays. All 14 homes have different themes, ranging from inflatable cartoon characters to an entire narrated religious display complete with nativity scenes and a herd of cardboard sheep. Stephanie Price’s home is lined with red and green lights.
“The yard is trimmed with candy canes, all the rock and bushes are completely covered with white lights," Price said. "In the front yard we have a 25-foot Santa Claus. We’ve got three nutcrackers that block the driveway and we have a 40-foot snowman that waves at everyone when they come by.”
Price has lived in this house for more than 20 years and she said Christmas lights have always been a big part of her holidays. Growing up, her family had a light feud with their neighbors.
“When we were kids, my brother and I would ride our bicycles over to their house and we’d come back and be like dad there’s like five more strings of lights on the house,” she said. “Then my dad would go and put up 10 more.”
Residents of Natal Circle put up the lights themselves, but there are professionals for the job. Doug Topham owns Christmas Light Decorators. The company specializes in commercial light displays. His company decorates about 340 places around Arizona.
Topham said lighting is becoming more green.
“With LED lights we use about one-sixth of the power," he said.
Topham explains LED (light-emitting diode) lights last four to five seasons, while the old incandescent lights lasted only one. This year, Topham is trying out a new technology that allows for more variety.
“Each bulb is programmable,” he said. “We can program the entire tree, we can program every single bulb to be different or to change or to stay the same.”
Topham decorated 16 blocks of downtown Glendale for Glendale Glitters this year. Crews spent more than 5,000 hours putting up the 1.4 million lights for this project. Crew start putting up lights as early as August. Residents at Natal Circle start just a few months later, around Halloween.
“One time, one of the houses the people moved and no one lived at the house so all the neighbors ran extension cords over to their house and put Christmas lights on their house for them," neighbor Todd Kleinman said.
He said the whole neighborhood puts up the lights because they want to, not because of any Homeowners Association rule. One neighbor left $8000 worth of lights for the new homeowner after he moved. Several thousand people come by to the see the lights each weekend. Natal Circle will stay lit until Dec. 31.
