Chattanooga: Holiday decor lights up night

After 11 years off, Bill and Shirley Burton are back to their festive holiday ways.

The couple, who started decking their Christmas halls in grand fashion in 1979, stopped decorating their Hixson home in 1997 after Bill, 77, had two strokes. This year, though, they’ve strung up another display, breaking their hiatus, although they’re keeping their decorations on the ground.

“Since he had his strokes, he’s not able to get up on roof and do that,” Mrs. Burton said.

A Nativity, a Santa and reindeer are accompanied by music and several hundred boxes of lights at their Ethyelyn Lane home in Hixson.

“I just love Christmas, that’s all I know,” Mrs. Burton said.

If exterior decorations are any indication, plenty of Chattanoogans appear to share her Christmas spirit. Some go for lights, sometimes enough to distract passing aircraft.

“We’ve had people say planes on the way to Lovell Field might mistake it for a beacon of some sort,” said Jay Woods, whose home is decorated to mimic the Griswolds’ house from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”

Others prefer air-filled inflatables, the kind that waggle and wobble in the cold winter breezes. Red Bank resident Paul Thomas, for instance, has lots of bulging Christmas cheer — 16 inflatable yard decorations in his front yard along Dayton Boulevard. Among his yard residents are Christmas trees, a few Santas, several snowmen, an igloo and such can’t-have-Christmas-without-’em icons as a penguin, a race car and a dog.

He never intended to go overboard, he said, but decorating is contagious.

“Everybody started coming by, so I just kept adding to it,” he explained.

Now he’s planning to eventually add an extra circuit to his fuse box to accommodate the seasonal power surge.

His strategy for buying decorations is simple — go to the stores in the final days before Christmas or the days right after and look for marked-down stuff. As for the overall theme of what he buys, that’s simple, too.

“Basically, what’s big and bright,” said Mr. Thomas, who also hosts an inflated armada at Halloween.

Decorators such as Mr. Thomas insist that it’s not just for them that they fill their yards with lights, lit-up figures, music, fake snow, inflatables, mechanical devices, religious icons and whatever else may catch their fancy. It’s a labor of love for the people in their areas, they say.

“It’s a Christmas gift to the whole community for me and my family,” said John Brewer, who takes more than a week and two friends to help put up his 50,000 lights on Daugherty Lane.

And — usually — everyone else enjoys it, too.

“The neighbors love it,” Mrs. Burton said. “We only had one person object, and she moved away.”