Home holiday displays that are simply stellar
There is a certain breed of Western New Yorker for whom Christmas is something much more than a holiday. It’s more than a decorating opportunity, more than a chance to wade through oceans of shoppers at the Galleria Mall and even –for some –more important than the holiday’s religious underpinnings.
It is a chance, after another long and difficult year, to create shimmering beacons of goodwill on their front lawns, constructed from floppy inflatable Santas, entire hand-crafted villages of Smurfs and Peanuts characters, miles of LED icicle lights, animatronic Grinches, wire-frame reindeer, nuclear-powered nativity scenes and wobbly plastic penguins arranged just so.
See and hear more of the holiday light displays on Buffalo News video.
Like a ragtag army of kitsch conscripts, these time-tested figures of Western New York’s yuletide season come marching onto snowy lawns from Gowanda to Tonawanda before most of us have had a chance to recover from our turkey-induced Thanksgiving comas. And there they steadfastly remain –gleaming, flashing, whirring and otherwise vying desperately for our attention –until well past New Year’s Day. And to heck with the $300 electricity bill.
We traversed Erie and Niagara counties to seek out these unflappable dispensers of holiday cheer, expecting to find most displays more tacky than touching. But what we found was always driven by a deep, irrepressible and ultimately uplifting desire to make other people happy. And in these lean times, that’s an easy sentiment to embrace. The highlights:
5059 William St., Lancaster
Established: 1992
• Installation: 1-2 weeks
Average December electricity bill: $300
Richard and Sue Kozlowski’s house sits on a quiet stretch of road in Lancaster. To say that driving past it during the holidays could induce whiplash is a woeful understatement.
Since 1992, the family has been coming together to construct its ever-expanding Christmas display, which features everything from a pair of handmade wooden snowmen crafted by Richard’s father to an enormous nativity scene patched together over the years into a motley retinue of biblical characters.
About their December electric bill? “I think it’s worth it. I mean, we have fun when we do it,” Sue Kozlowski said. “It makes kids happy. It makes other people happy. And at Christmas, you should be happy no matter what’s happening.”
24 Northwood Drive, Tonawanda
Established: 1995
• Installation: About a week
• Lights used: 20,000
A neighborhood favorite, the Deck family house is a high-wattage spectacle that may very well be visible from space. But believe it or not, its brightness isn’t the main feature.
Paul Deck, who works in construction, builds the display’s many wooden figures –from a sinister cut-out of the Grinch to a full-size elf house — by hand in his off-site workshop. When a figure breaks, he’ll fix it up there and bring it back home, and the neighborhood kids are all the happier for it.
“Every year I change it. You’ll never see the same things,” Deck said. “One year I had all penguins, then gingerbread. Then I did this this year,” he added, pointing to a green elf house he had constructed just for this season. “I usually put the reindeer on the roof."
4663 Clark St., Hamburg
Established: 1975
• Installation: About 1 week
Amount spent on new LED lights this year: $300
Domenick Della Neve, a retired Buffalo letter carrier, lives alone in an imposing house at the top of a hill in Hamburg. With the help of his son Gary and other family members, he has meticulously decorated his large, sloping property for more than 30 years, at the insistence of his late wife Josephine.
When his wife died nine years ago, Della Neve carried on the tradition as a tribute to her. He even made a sign announcing that the whole affair was her idea.
“If no other holiday in all of the 365 days, this was her favorite and she insisted every year that we do this and we do that. Like I said, she was the one that more or less set up what you see out here now,” Della Neve said.
2642 Pinelake Drive, Wheatfield
Established: 2002
• Installation: 1 week
• Tune your car radio to: 95.1 FM
When Thanksgiving rolls around, Steve Trimper undergoes a transformation. This tough, solidly built Italian man adopts the self-styled persona of “Mr. Christmas.” And the house he shares with his wife Frances in Wheatfield transforms as well, from a clean-cut suburban property to a musical light show that could give the Trans-Siberian Orchestra a run for its money.
Starting about five years ago, at his former home in Tonawanda, Trimper began programming musical light displays, in which the various holiday figures and lights on his lawn and house were individually and painstakingly timed to move with often obscure Christmas music.
Out of respect for the neighbors, Trimper built an FM radio transmitter, and now people come from far and wide to this little Wheatfield subdivision to watch and listen to the light show from the comfort of their cars.
–Additional reporting by Joseph Popiolkowski
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