Dazzling Christmas Lights Displays in the GTA

Martin was the youngest of nine children in their Fruitland, Ont., home. She said they didn’t have much; Martin’s father had passed away. Yet, despite having a lot on her plate, her mother made the festivities a focus for the family.

“She hauled in the tree by herself, decorated the house by herself,” says Martin, 52. “My mother was a big Christmas lover. Even the year she passed away — she was 88 — she was still putting up decorations. I inherited all her Christmas decorations.”

Martin also inherited her mother’s spirit for the season. When she met her husband Trevor Walker, she said he grumbled about the lights. But then they had their own children.

 

“I told him, ‘It’s not about you, it’s about the kids.’ And it was like the lights turned on in his head, literally. Then he started involving himself, and took over. When I did it, I hung the twinkling white lights, cedar boughs and red bows.

“When my husband took over about 10 years ago, first he added the coloured lights. Then it became the Griswoldian light show from hell,” Martin says, laughing, about the over-the-top decorating done by the character played by Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

The couple’s decorations were among those sent to the Star when we asked readers to tell us about some of the city’s best festive light displays.

 

An old-fashioned Santa and sleigh at Karin Martin's house.

In a quiet residential neighbourhood near Dufferin St. and Eglinton Ave. W., Mary Genua has been decorating her home for almost 30 years. She used to work at nearby St. John Bosco Catholic school and did it for the neighbourhood kids after starting with a few decorations, and then outdoing herself each year.

“I love Christmas as much as the kids do,” says Genua, leaning on a cane, admiring her latest acquisitions on the front lawn: a new snowman and two pre-lit artificial Christmas trees. “I got a good deal on the trees. They are normally $300 each, but I got ’em for $45 on a Boxing Day sale,” she says.  

 

Mary Genua has spent nearly 30 years decorating her home at 6 Holmesdale Cres. She expands her display each year.

“You have to try these glasses on,” she says, handing out 3-D glasses that make the tree appear covered with Santa and reindeers. “Isn’t that cool?!”

Andrew Fraser began hanging Christmas lights on his towering Norwegian maple after watching an arborist trim a neighbour’s tree in his Lawrence Ave. W. and Avenue Rd. neighbourhood.

“What they use is, literally, a big sling shot, weighted down by a bean bag. It was the coolest thing,” says Fraser. Intrigued, he bought one of the contraptions and used it to string a few lights around the big tree.

Then he fine-tuned the concept of an installation hanging from first branch — roughly one-and-a-half storeys high.

 

Andrew Fraser creates a new, 1-1/2-storey design each year and this Christmas dedicated his efforts to the peace sign seen as a symbol of global unity in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris.

“Over the years I’ve done Christmas balls, a chandelier, a giant candy cane, a snowman, a shooting star,” he adds. This year’s peace sign came up during a conversation at a neighbourhood party. “I am not a particularly political person . . . But just given the sense of community, and the stuff going on in the news, it struck a chord. I originally thought of doing an angel. A peace symbol was much easier.”

There’s no particular symbolism to the decorations festooning Grace D’Elia’s home in Parkdale, famous as one of the brightest Christmas lights displays in the city. The front lawn is filled with snowmen, a duck, a rooster, a penguin, candy canes, angels, snowflakes and stars. There’s a Christmas countdown clock on the porch.

 

Grace D’Elia’s home in Parkdale is known as one of the brightest displays in the city.

“My parents still do as much as they can. There’s got to be over 5,000 lights out there,” she says. “Now my father likes to put together his Christmas Village. He enjoys setting it up in the dining room.”

Meanwhile, in Mississauga, Sharon and Chuck Langley make their apartment building a winter wonderland. Sharon, 65, and Chuck, 83, both from the East Coast, are supervisors of the building and self-described “Christmas nuts.”

 

Christine Murphy, a.k.a. Ms Kandy Kane, with superintendants Chuck and Sharon Langley in the lobby of the apartment building they turn into a winter wonderland.

The Langley’s Mississauga Christmas cheer started off nine years ago with decorating the lobby. It spread into the mailbox area — and then outside.

“We do it for the kids. We’re big softies,” says Sharon.

“We have the best Santa Claus, he has a real beard,” says Sharon. “Santa Claus stays until the last kid has gone. It’s just fantastic watching the kids, their eyes bulging out.”  

 

Vince Talotta

Sharon and Chuck Langley's apartment building in Mississauga lights up for the holiday season.

Santa Claus

The man we know as Santa Claus has a history all his own. Today, he is thought of mainly as the jolly man in red, but his story stretches all the way back to the 3rd century. Find out more about the history of Santa Claus from his earliest origins to the shopping mall favorite of today, and discover how two New Yorkers–Clement Clark Moore and Thomas Nast–were major influences on the Santa Claus millions of children wait for each Christmas Eve.

The Legend of St. Nicholas 

 

The legend of Santa Claus can be traced back hundreds of years to a monk named St. Nicholas. It is believed that Nicholas was born sometime around 280 A.D. in Patara, near Myra in modern-day Turkey. Much admired for his piety and kindness, St. Nicholas became the subject of many legends. It is said that he gave away all of his inherited wealth and traveled the countryside helping the poor and sick. One of the best known of the St. Nicholas stories is that he saved three poor sisters from being sold into slavery or prostitution by their father by providing them with a dowry so that they could be married.

Over the course of many years, Nicholas’s popularity spread and he became known as the protector of children and sailors. His feast day is celebrated on the anniversary of his death, December 6. This was traditionally considered a lucky day to make large purchases or to get married. By the Renaissance, St. Nicholas was the most popular saint in Europe. Even after the Protestant Reformation, when the veneration of saints began to be discouraged, St. Nicholas maintained a positive reputation, especially in Holland.

Sinter Klaas Comes to New York 

 

St. Nicholas made his first inroads into American popular culture towards the end of the 18th century. In December 1773, and again in 1774, a New York newspaper reported that groups of Dutch families had gathered to honor the anniversary of his death.

The name Santa Claus evolved from Nick’s Dutch nickname, Sinter Klaas, a shortened form of Sint Nikolaas (Dutch for Saint Nicholas). In 1804, John Pintard, a member of the New York Historical Society, distributed woodcuts of St. Nicholas at the society’s annual meeting. The background of the engraving contains now-familiar Santa images including stockings filled with toys and fruit hung over a fireplace. In 1809, Washington Irving helped to popularize the Sinter Klaas stories when he referred to St. Nicholas as the patron saint of New York in his book, The History of New York. As his prominence grew, Sinter Klaas was described as everything from a “rascal” with a blue three-cornered hat, red waistcoat, and yellow stockings to a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a “huge pair of Flemish trunk hose.”

Shopping Mall Santas 

 

Gift-giving, mainly centered around children, has been an important part of the Christmas celebration since the holiday’s rejuvenation in the early 19th century. Stores began to advertise Christmas shopping in 1820, and by the 1840s, newspapers were creating separate sections for holiday advertisements, which often featured images of the newly-popular Santa Claus. In 1841, thousands of children visited a Philadelphia shop to see a life-size Santa Claus model.

It was only a matter of time before stores began to attract children, and their parents, with the lure of a peek at a “live” Santa Claus. In the early 1890s, the Salvation Army needed money to pay for the free Christmas meals they provided to needy families. They began dressing up unemployed men in Santa Claus suits and sending them into the streets of New York to solicit donations. Those familiar Salvation Army Santas have been ringing bells on the street corners of American cities ever since.

‘Twas the Night before Christmas 

 

In 1822, Clement Clarke Moore, an Episcopal minister, wrote a long Christmas poem for his three daughters entitled “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas.” Moore’s poem, which he was initially hesitant to publish due to the frivolous nature of its subject, is largely responsible for our modern image of Santa Claus as a “right jolly old elf” with a portly figure and the supernatural ability to ascend a chimney with a mere nod of his head! Although some of Moore’s imagery was probably borrowed from other sources, his poem helped popularize the now-familiar image of a Santa Claus who flew from house to house on Christmas Eve–in “a miniature sleigh” led by eight flying reindeer–leaving presents for deserving children.

“An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” created a new and immediately popular American icon. In 1881, political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew on Moore’s poem to create the first likeness that matches our modern image of Santa Claus. His cartoon, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly, depicted Santa as a rotund, cheerful man with a full, white beard, holding a sack laden with toys for lucky children. It is Nast who gave Santa his bright red suit trimmed with white fur, North Pole workshop, elves, and his wife, Mrs. Claus.

A Santa by Any Other Name 

18th-century America’s Santa Claus was not the only St. Nicholas-inspired gift-giver to make an appearance at Christmastime. Similar figures were popular all over the world. Christkind or Kris Kringle was believed to deliver presents to well-behaved Swiss and German children. Meaning “Christ child,” Christkind is an angel-like figure often accompanied by St. Nicholas on his holiday missions. In Scandinavia, a jolly elf named Jultomten was thought to deliver gifts in a sleigh drawn by goats. English legend explains that Father Christmas visits each home on Christmas Eve to fill children’s stockings with holiday treats. Pere Noel is responsible for filling the shoes of French children.

In Russia, it is believed that an elderly woman named Babouschka purposely gave the wise men wrong directions to Bethlehem so that they couldn’t find Jesus. Later, she felt remorseful, but could not find the men to undo the damage. To this day, on January 5, Babouschka visits Russian children leaving gifts at their bedsides in the hope that one of them is the baby Jesus and she will be forgiven. In Italy, a similar story exists about a woman called La Befana, a kindly witch who rides a broomstick down the chimneys of Italian homes to deliver toys into the stockings of lucky children.
The Ninth Reindeer

Rudolph, “the most famous reindeer of all,” was born over a hundred years after his eight flying counterparts. The red-nosed wonder was the creation of Robert L. May, a copywriter at the Montgomery Ward department store.

In 1939, May wrote a Christmas-themed story-poem to help bring holiday traffic into his store. Using a similar rhyme pattern to Moore’s “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” May told the story of Rudolph, a young reindeer who was teased by the other deer because of his large, glowing, red nose. But, When Christmas Eve turned foggy and Santa worried that he wouldn’t be able to deliver gifts that night, the former outcast saved Christmas by leading the sleigh by the light of his red nose. Rudolph’s message—that given the opportunity, a liability can be turned into an asset—proved popular. Montgomery Ward sold almost two and a half million copies of the story in 1939.

When it was reissued in 1946, the book sold over three and half million copies. Several years later, one of May’s friends, Johnny Marks, wrote a short song based on Rudolph’s story (1949). It was recorded by Gene Autry and sold over two million copies. Since then, the story has been translated into 25 languages and been made into a television movie, narrated by Burl Ives, which has charmed audiences every year since 1964.

Evolution of Santa Claus

Christmas Tree Lights

Gilbert neighborhood's light display wins ABC's 'The Great Christmas Light Fight'

A Gilbert neighborhood's Christmas-lights display is getting national recognition.

"Christmas on Comstock," located in the 3600 block of East Comstock Drive, won the $50,000 grand prize during Monday night's episode of ABC's "The Great Christmas Light Fight." The weekly show typically pits holiday-lights experts from across America, who compete by decorating their homes to the extreme.

During Monday night's episode, Christmas on Comstock edged out "Jeter Bend" from Celebration, Fla., and "Waikele Christmas Light," from Waipahu, Hawaii. The Gilbert neighborhood was the first in the Valley to win an episode of the show, which is in the midst of its third season.

How it happened

Brian McNamara, who organized the Gilbert display, said the show's producers approached him in early August about participating after they saw a drone video he posted on YouTube of last year's light display.

Sixty-eight neighbors -- half of them kids -- spread across 13 houses and started building the display Sept. 17, and finished it exactly one month later. ABC crews spent five days filming in Gilbert and relied on handy-cam footage to fill out the rest.

The end result was a display consisting of more than 500 circuits, 110,000 lights, 285 strobe lights, and over 50,000 feet of wire. The roughly 10-minute display show is set to four songs, which visitors can listen to on 93.9 FM as they drive or walk through.

"We all just sort of helped each other out," McNamara said. "We had to up our game for the TV show."

The group was announced as the winners by co-host Carter Oosterhouse on Nov. 1. They signed confidentiality agreements that made them keep the results a secret.

On Monday, the display's organizers wheeled a projector, a 10-foot screen, heaters and speakers into the street so the entire block could watch the show together. Each house received identical trophies, which were modeled after Christmas-light bulbs.

"We were really pumped," McNamara said. "It's a ton of work to put it together. ... It meant a lot to the neighborhood."

Starting a tradition

 

McNamara, who is a finance and accounting analyst, said he first started doing Christmas-lights displays at his home in the San Tan Valley area in 2005. He taught himself how to do it through YouTube and started with a display of 5,000 lights and 16 circuits.

He's kept the tradition going since he moved to Gilbert five years ago, growing the display from just his house to the entire neighborhood. He said he and his neighbors pay out of pocket for the display, which typically bumps his electricity bill up by about $50 in the month of December.

He said the meaning of the display outweighs the cost, especially for children.

"It's the traditions that people remember, not the gifts," he said. "The memories that last forever are greater than gifts."

McNamara said the $50,000 award will be split evenly among the 13 families. His family is going to donate a portion of their winnings to Make-a-Wish Arizona.

Christmas on Comstock also accepts donations, which are given to Make-a-Wish Arizona as well.
"Our goal is to be able to grant one wish to a local Arizona kid," McNamara said. "So far, we're well on track."

When asked how he will top the display next year, McNamara said that right now, all he can think about is sleep. But once the holidays are over, the next step is the easiest.
"It comes down a lot faster than the time it takes to put it up," he said. "It goes quick."

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