Every year around this time, Arizona neighborhoods are illuminated with plastic Santas, inflatable snowmen and lights hanging from houses, trees and pretty much anything else they can hang from.
Holiday music sings out of little, often hidden speakers. And lots of us map out the best houses to see these displays, either doing a drive-by or actually getting out of the car to see them up close.
On a recent evening, The Show met up with Carl Jimenez at his north Phoenix home near Union Hills Drive and First Avenue.
Jimenez runs light displays for the Fourth of July, Halloween and other holidays, in addition to Christmas. His holiday display takes up pretty much his entire driveway, front yard and one of his side yards.
And there’s a lot to see: gingerbread people, Santa’s workshop, Mrs. Claus’ kitchen, a hidden village and so much more. The Show talked to him about why we does it.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Well, you do certainly have different areas around here. Like you have right in front of us is Santa's workshop. You have a little house behind us. You have some inflatables behind us here. Is this kind of what you're talking about? Like each year you kind of add on different stuff.
JIMENEZ: Exactly. Yeah. Usually I'll say like, oh, you know, a couple years ago we added this side of the house because I was like, oh, we're not really using this space over here. Maybe we could do something along there. This year, the big new addition this year is our Jin Jurassic Park. I think we had this, we have this great Palo Verde tree over here that's we still have in the front yard, but we used to have another big Palo Verde tree over here and monsoon took it out and we used to hang like snowflakes, you know, from it and it was sort of a backdrop to some other stuff. And then, you know, a few months ago it was just like gone and I was like, I can't believe my tree is gone. What am I going to do with that space? And I'm like, Because I've always, I've always seen, I'd never done inflatables before because I tried it once, but because the Palo Verdes, they're so thorny, any inflatable anywhere near it, gets ripped up, it like shreds them. So I was like, well, I guess I can never do inflatables. And then suddenly this tree was gone. I was like, oh, I could do lots of inflatables, really big ones.
And so I had seen somebody do dinosaurs, Christmas dinosaurs. And I was like, oh, I like that, but I want to sort of theme it out a little bit more. And so we came up with the Jin Jurassic Park. concept. And we've got like renamed our dinosaurs to be like Christmas themed. So instead of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, it's the Tyrannosaurus Wraps. And it talks about him, like how he likes to wrap presents. Instead of a Brontosaurus, we've got our Brightosaurus. He likes hanging up Christmas lights really high up in the trees and things like that. So yeah.
BRODIE: So at what point do you start thinking about what you're going to do here? Like how early does the planning start?
JIMENEZ: It doesn't stop. It doesn't stop. It doesn't start. Like, I've got things like, you know, it's all set up and done. I'm like, maybe I could add a new little thing. There's this one little corner. I moved something out of the way, and now there's an empty spot. What can I put there? And it's literally just, it really is literally like just throughout the entire year. I'm always kind of, you know, like a lot of this, I try not to buy much new. I always try and like either repurpose like old things. I find things that people are selling that are used, or I'll kind of make my own things, like a lot of sort of DIY type stuff. So it's really always going on.
BRODIE: What do your neighbors think about this?
JIMENEZ: That's always a big question with really any of these light shows. The thing we find with our neighborhood is that the further away from our house in the neighborhood, the more the neighbors kind of like it.
BRODIE: So right next door, maybe not so much?
JIMENEZ: Right next door, right across the street, maybe not so much. You get a couple houses down and they like it a little bit more. Get a few houses down and they love it. And like, you know, when you're at the very edge of the neighborhood, they're like, oh, go for it. We love it. It's fantastic.
BRODIE: So I want to ask you about the traffic by here, because just in the few minutes that we've been here, maybe a half dozen, maybe more cars have driven past. This one's been sitting out here in front of your house for maybe 4 or 5 minutes already. Is that a pretty common thing? You see a pretty steady stream of cars at night, come by and look.
JIMENEZ: Yeah, it is. It varies with the day of the week. Earlier in the month, it's really pretty much just like kind of Fridays, Saturdays primarily. But the closer we get to Christmas, it tends to be pretty much every night of the week. and we don't do a lot of real heavy promotion of our display. There are other displays in town that they really go all out with really promoting it heavy and they, it's reflected in the traffic in the traffic that they get to where it almost feels like it becomes more and more of a problem for them and for their neighbors. And so I try not to really over promote it and over sort of sort of want it to be more of a kind of like best kept secret kind of thing. I'd like it to just feel real sort of like cozy and personal and for people to feel like it's something that they kind of discovered. In general, the overall look is I try and have a real sort of vintage kind of DIY sort of feel to it.
It's computer controlled, but if you didn't know that, you wouldn't like suspect that. sometimes, there's like different ways you can do displays and a lot of people will do them like that really focus on the high tech to where it looks like this like sort of like space disco kind of thing and it's all like laser beams and it's like so like fancy and flashy. You know, that's just not a direction that I like to go, but I know a lot of people are really into that and, you know, that's great for them. I'd like to sort of have the technology sort of hidden kind of below the surface a little bit. So, you don't feel it. You just kind of experience it, but you don't really question, what's, how do they do it?
BRODIE: So this might be somewhat of an obvious question, but are you a big Christmas guy?
JIMENEZ: I am. I just, you know, really love the holiday season and really like all the holidays. There's just something I really like about, I really enjoy about, I don't know, just sharing like the like the fun of the season and the different types of emotions and stuff that go along with each season. Because the Fourth of July show we do, it's fantastic. And I love doing, like all the Sousa, March numbers and the big patriotic songs. And it's sort of like big and, heavy patriotic-y. kind of vibe. And it's very different from what the Christmas is. And what Christmas is like the warm and fuzzy and the coziness and all that. Yeah, I just really like bringing out the different types of emotions of the different seasons and kind of enhancing that.
BRODIE: All right, Carl Jimenez, thanks for having us out and Merry Christmas.
JIMENEZ: Merry Christmas to you. Thank you.
