Dreaming of a Megawatt Christmas

It all started with four strings of blue lights

To create the finished Christmas extravaganza, Butch Colby begins around Thanksgiving, outlining the roof in red lights and putting a sleigh on top. (Photograph by D.A. Peterson)

Every Christmas, Butch and Barb Colby's house brings a warm glow to their Columbia neighborhood.

Forty thousand light bulbs will do that. In fact, a house decorated with 40,000 light bulbs -- not to mention eight elves, six Santa Clauses, five penguins, two polar bears, an igloo, an inflatable snowman and a hay-strewn manger scene with the requisite troika of Wise Men and enigmatic plastic baby Jesus -- brings a lot of things to a neighborhood: people making an annual pilgrimage, tour buses packed with senior citizens, late-night vandals eager to bash something besides mailboxes.

The house has not, as yet, brought an airliner, its pilot confused on final approach by the profusion of glowing and blinking lights. But it has brought an airline passenger.

"One guy saw our home from the plane window as he was coming in to BWI and wanted to come see it," says Butch. "He asked a cabdriver to take him to Columbia's Christmas house."

It is a testament to Butch Colby's single-minded holiday vision that a rather indistinct instruction -- "Take me to Columbia's Christmas house" -- was enough to deliver that weary traveler to the corner of Windharp and Deep Calm. And there, in deepest Cul-de-sacistan, he found one of those houses.

You know the kind: a house so slathered with lights, so bedecked with plastic doodads, so encrusted with miniature structures and animatronic figures and ersatz Christmas trees, that, gazing upon it, you feel as if you have stumbled into Santa's acid flashback or the fevered Christmas imaginings of Dr. Seuss by way of Salvador Dali.

You wonder, as you gawk and gape, how the hell they did it. And why.

IT'S THANKSGIVING MORNING, and to the untrained eye it appears that the Colby house is already decorated. The roof is outlined in red lights. Five plastic reindeer tethered to a metal pole are pulling a sleigh over the garage. Strings of green lights fan out from the top of the pole in an isosceles triangle that reasonably approximates the familiar shape of a Christmas tree.

This is all the work of the previous weekend, when a dozen friends and neighbors pitched in to get things started. But some of the hardest work remains. Boxes of decorations -- stored during the offseason in the barn of a guy Butch knows -- are strewn across the Colby driveway, which on this frigid pre-turkey morning resembles a staging ground for a military campaign.

In fact, it looks a bit chaotic. A blue 1957 Ford Thunderbird is barely visible in the garage, covered as it is with boxes and tools. The pale feet of baby Jesus are sticking out from one cardboard box; the head of a donkey peers from another. A milk crate is full of wooden stakes, like the lost property of a vampire hunter.

But Butch Colby has a plan.

"I found out a long time ago that it would drive you crazy if you didn't have that," he says.

It is fair to say that Butch doesn't do anything halfway. For nearly 30 years he has led what must surely be one of Maryland's most active Boy Scout troops. In the summer his Scouts will camp at a lake north of Winnipeg, a trip that will require being flown in by float plane. His three grown sons remember being awakened at the crack of dawn, even on weekends, to help him with the various chores he had planned. He is the all-American father, a guy who can fix things (cars) and make things (bookcases) and catch things (fish).

This morning Butch is dressed as a suburban lumberjack: jeans, denim shirt, flannel barn coat -- a pair of needle-nose pliers nestled in a front pocket. A blue Timberland knit cap sits atop his gray head.

Both Butch and his wife, Barb -- a compact, dark-haired woman with cupid's-bow lips -- are originally from Minnesota. They are both 60 and pepper their conversation with "You betchas." When Butch says "yes" it comes out sounding sort of like "ay-yah."

As in, "Ay-yah, you need a plan."

Butch's plan for this holiday season of 2003 is sketched out on a well-worn piece of paper. All the light strands that girdle the house and enwrap the yard are numbered, as are the extension cords. The plan shows, for example, that the light string numbered 7A goes up the right side of the garage. With perhaps a few tweaks, the plan is likely being followed once again as you read this story.

"He's the commander in chief," says the middle of Butch and Barb's three thirtysomething sons, Trevor. "He knows exactly where everything needs to be."

And what he wants Trevor to do right now is to put white swag lights and red, lighted bows on the split-rail fence that encloses the back yard.

"What you wanna try to do is get the plugs together," says Butch. "Sometimes the bows you can tie right into the swag lights."

The swag lights are kind of a pain to put up, Butch explains. The little eyehooks he's driven into the fence to hold them rust and crumble. The lights get twisted. They have to be arranged just so if you want the plugs to line up correctly.

"But they look pretty good," he says.

Trevor starts hanging the swag lights along the fence. A contractor, he lives in a 105-year-old farm house near Westminster, a house that doesn't have the juice to mount a display as elaborate as his father's.

"I only have 100 watts coming into my house," Trevor says, "so I know right off the bat I can't do anything."

It is hard to tell whether he is disappointed or relieved.

IT STARTED SMALL, AS MANY THINGS DO, as the Grand Canyon did and Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

The grain of sand in the great oyster that was to become the pulsating, electrified pearl of Windharp and Deep Calm was four strings of blue lights Butch bought in 1974, when he and Barb were living in Red Wing, Minn.

Fifty lights per string: 200 lights.

"I just put these strings across the eaves of the house and thought that kinda looked neat," says Butch. "Then I remembered what my uncle did, and from there on was when I really started."

That would be Butch's Uncle Johnny, his father's brother. When Butch was growing up in Excelsior, Minn., a tiny town on Lake Minnetonka, Johnny Colby achieved a small measure of fame as the person most likely to win the annual Christmas decorating contest sponsored by the local power company.

"They did it as a way to get people to use more electricity, basically," says Butch.

At the time -- the 1950s -- not too many people went overboard when decorating the outside of a house. But the lure of a prize -- Butch says it probably wasn't more than $100 in gift certificates to local stores -- inspired Uncle Johnny. And that meant that every December the Excelsior police department would detail an officer to stand in front of Uncle Johnny's house and direct the stream of automobiles that crawled by.

What the people in those cars would see as they drove past was a modest Cape Cod topped by a 25-foot, roof-mounted Christmas tree held in place by cables. ("I don't know how he ever got it up there," marvels Butch), a manger scene to the side of the house with full-size shepherds ("It wasn't the nice plastic ones we have today, though," Butch points out) and evergreens swaddled in lights.

Plus, says Butch, "He had a bunch of little animals and stuff around."

That profusion of items -- a style that could be called Colby Baroque -- was to become a hallmark of Butch's own foray into extreme decorating.

In 1975 Butch moved his family to Columbia, where he had taken a job with a company that built simulators used to train power plant operators. The Colbys decorated their new house at Christmas. The display was modest at first -- a few lights -- but in 1982 Butch came across a woodworking magazine that included plans for a Santa's sleigh and reindeer. He had always been handy, issuing a regular stream of jigsawed items from his basement woodworking shop, but he'd never made his own Christmas decorations before.

The homemade Santa sleigh got such good reviews from neighbors that it created a sort of self-perpetuating feedback loop, says Butch's oldest son, Greg: The more compliments Butch received, the more he was motivated to up the ante. The more he upped the ante, the more people expected him to up it even more.

"And they would ask, 'What's new for next year?' -- like it was some big secret," says Greg. " 'Are you going to do a manger scene? Is there going to be a Santa's workshop?' "

And the answer was always yes.

In 1987, Butch and Barb started a tradition they call the Grand Lighting, sending out invitations to the neighborhood to come on the first Saturday in December and watch as, at precisely 5:30 p.m., the switches are thrown.

Some years, the fire department would bring a truck, and a friend would dress up as Santa. Candy canes were handed out. Toys were collected for charity.

"The only thing that bothered me was there was so much pressure," Barb says. "We had to get all this stuff done by a certain date because this is what you advertised."

ON THE SATURDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING, it looks as if Barb is hosting a corn-shucking or a crab-picking party at the table in her large, eat-in kitchen. She and two of her friends, Kim Rosado and Joan Ford, are nimbly running their fingers through strings of lights, searching for burned-out bulbs or blown fuses.

Kim is engrossed in checking a wire reindeer covered in clear lights that, when plugged in, appears to graze, its lowered head moving slowly from side to side. The head is moving, and most of the lights work, but the reindeer's left leg is dark.

"Any missing bulbs?" Barb asks.

"There's a broken one right here," Kim says. "Do we have any more clear bulbs?"

She replaces the bad bulb and plugs the reindeer in again. It's cured.

"This one is ready to gallop into the back yard," Kim says.

Before the fading sunlight ends decorating for the day, this will be accomplished:

Kim's son, Andy, will wrap multicolored lights around a bush in the back yard.

Another neighbor, Don Plasse, will erect an inflatable igloo.

Barb will walk out, see the igloo and exclaim, "You know what would be cute, Butch? If we had one of the polar bears going inside the igloo."

Butch will position a plastic polar bear going inside the igloo.

Andy's father, Jack Rosado, will unpack several 24-inch animated figurines dressed in Victorian garb ("The original Motion-ettes. Sculpted with exclusive PORCELITE").

The inflatable igloo will start to deflate.

Trevor and his 3-year-old son, Nickolas, will spread a bale of hay around a wooden manger over by the driveway.

Andy will crawl, David Blaine-like, into a plexiglass-fronted miniature Santa's workshop to position three animatronic elves.

Nick will snap ears onto the manger scene's plastic cows.

Trevor will notice that one ear is missing and will position that cow so the side of its head is against a hay bale, obscuring its deformity.

Butch will test a set of musical bells he's strung in another miniature house and be displeased when several emit a tinny sound because they aren't hanging properly.

This reporter will string icicle lights around the deck in the back yard, taking an inordinate amount of pride in completing the simple task.

Butch will survey his empire and say: "This is good. The only major thing we've got left is to put lights in the trees."

HERE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CHRISTMAS DECORATING in the great outdoors: Electricity is your friend. It is what gives life to the wonders of roof and yard, what makes the bobbing reindeer's head bob, what makes the chase lights chase, what powers the blower that keeps the eight-foot-tall inflatable snowman inflated. Without juice, and lots of it, it may as well be Easter.

When he was in the Navy, Butch was an electrician, so he knows his amps and volts.

"I have two separate circuits with two 60-amp breakers each that supply power just to my Christmas lights," he says. That's 240 extra amps that are on tap for only about one month a year.

Here is the second-most-important thing you need to know about Christmas decorating in the great outdoors: Water is your enemy.

It may be essential to life itself. It may fall as snow and make quaint whatever it touches. But when Butch Colby thinks of water, he imagines short circuits and the acrid smell of burning wire. He envisions a wispy curl of smoke hidden by his hedges and then tiny tongues of flame licking at the siding of his house. He imagines returning home from a late dinner with Barb to see their house not as they left it -- twinkling, sparkling, an object of delight and awe -- but as the fuel source in a three-alarm conflagration.

How easy, Butch thinks, it must be to live in Palm Springs or Las Vegas or Death Valley, bone-dry places where folks are free to decorate their houses without engaging in a never-ending battle against moisture.

Over the years, Butch has developed many methods for combating rain and snow. He used to simply slip plastic zip-up bags over each receptacle, but water once got into one and a passerby stopped to tell Butch that there was smoke coming from the front of the house.

Now Butch wraps each plug in a plastic bag, duct tapes the bag shut, then duct tapes that to a wooden stake that he drives into the ground with a mallet, making sure the plug is three or four inches off the ground. Then he covers the whole arrangement with a makeshift umbrella: a two-liter soda bottle or gallon milk jug that he's cut the bottom off of. Then he staples the plastic bottle to the stake.

When he's done his yard looks like a strange hydroponic garden.

ON SUNDAY MORNING, BUTCH'S NEIGHBOR LARRY PETCOVIC IS RUBBING HIS HANDS TOGETHER TO STAY WARM.

"Today's tree day, right, Butch?" he says.

Tree day. Perhaps the most impressive element of Butch's display are three 45-foot trees studded with lights, two in the side yard, one in the front yard. In early photos of the house, the trees are barely a single story tall and look like they could be decorated by a man with a kitchen stool. They've quadrupled in height since then, and on this windy day no one is in any hurry to climb the considerably taller ladder required to get them decked out.

So Butch and Larry start with something more manageable. They carry two flat boxes -- each emblazoned with the legend "Original Spiralite Adjustable pre-lit tree sculpture" -- over to the center of the back yard.

Butch opens one of the boxes and slides out the contents: a coil of white plastic tubing covered in tiny lights and several lengths of thin white pipe.

"Let's see, I gotta remember how this goes up," Butch says, looking at the less-than-intuitive assemblage. He grabs the center of the coil and pulls straight up on it. Like a magic trick, an abstract Christmas tree -- a Spiralite! -- emerges from the box. He and Larry fit the sections of pipe together and plant the trunk of the plastic tree into the ground. Larry is deputized to secure the tree with guy wires made of fishing line, then set up the second one.

When Larry was growing up, his family didn't go in much for Christmas decorating, certainly not to the degree that Butch does it up. His father was a Baptist minister. "The lights were all too garish," Larry says.

Out in front of the house, Barb is contemplating the wedge of garden where a miniature Christmas village sprouts each year. Thirteen lighted porcelain structures -- houses, a lighthouse, a mill -- need to be positioned. A forest of little artificial fir trees needs to be pushed into the dirt.

But the patch of ground seems to have some sort of vegetation in it. Is it weeds, or woody detritus that should have been dead-headed last season? Or is it the kernel of new growth that will blossom forth in the spring? It makes a difference because Barb thinks the porcelain hamlet won't look good if it's nestled among this brown, leafy junk. She summons Butch and poses a question: "We have to decide: Are we going to be gardeners or are we going to be Christmas people?"

As if she needed to ask. They're Christmas people, and she and Butch start yanking out the brush to make a nice, neat setting for their holiday burg.

Meanwhile, Trevor is putting the finishing touches on what is perhaps the most complicated element in the display: a tiny, lighted picket fence about eight inches high that encircles the entire front yard. He and his younger brother, Todd, made it themselves, sawing scrap lumber, screwing pickets to rails in sections of various lengths, cutting notches where the fence had to go over tree roots.

Holidays are like time capsules, opened once a year, each Christmas carrying with it whiffs of Christmases past. The trappings of the holiday -- the favorite ornament, the wooden nutcracker, the treetop angel, Todd and Trevor's fence -- can by themselves conjure up memories of people and places.

The fence is a little worse for wear -- it spends the offseason under the deck -- but as Trevor handles it he remembers the year he and Todd made it. Trevor worked at a lumberyard and could save the choicest scraps for their project. The two of them set up an assembly line in the driveway, the sweat pouring off them as they cut hundreds of individual pickets with a circular saw and then shaped the top of each one into a little point.

He can remember how proud they were of their creation. How they numbered each segment with marker to make assembling the fence easier, and how, when the first numbering system didn't work, they numbered it again. (That one doesn't work either, Trevor decides, after arranging and rearranging the sections of fence on the ground before driving in the stakes that will hold it upright.)

Todd lives in Hartford, Conn., now. He can't be here to help set up the decorations, but he will be here for Christmas. And when he sees the fence he and Trevor made, perhaps he'll remember how, when the two of them were kids, they could read in their bedroom by the light that shone in the window from the glowing decorations outside. How sometimes late at night they would sneak out of their room to hide in the Santa's workshop in the yard, eavesdropping on the conversations of sightseers who strolled past.

It is time, Butch says, to do the trees. Butch has toyed with the idea of renting a cherry picker to make it easier to light the ever-growing evergreens, but this isn't the year.

Instead, Trevor opens a 12-foot wooden ladder beside one of two tall trees in the back yard. Then he takes a long strand of multicolored lights and lays it out on the grass, doubling it back on itself. The trick to stringing lights on tall trees, Trevor says, is the right tool and the right technique. The tool is a special pole with a hook at the end made from the handle of a paint roller. Trevor uses it to snare the midpoint of the light strand, rattlesnake wrangler-style.

Then, pole in hand, he climbs up the ladder, nearly to the top. Larry steadies the ladder with one hand and with the other holds an end of the light strand, keeping tension on it. Trevor reaches up to try to gingerly position the middle of the lights on an upper branch. It looks as if he's trying to crown a giraffe.

His first few attempts are unsuccessful. Then he manages to loop the lights on a branch. He moves the pole back and forth, grabbing sections of the lights with the hook and nestling them in the tree.

By the time he climbs down the ladder Trevor's arms are aching.

STROLLING AROUND BUTCH COLBY'S YARD IS LIKE TAKING A CORE SAMPLE from the history of illuminated American Christmas. There are the big thumb-long colored light bulbs familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1960s. There are tiny lights and rope lights and chase lights that can be programmed by a remote-control brain. There are sphere lights: little lights arranged on plastic, orb-shaped armatures.

The evolution of the Colby yard is also evident in a two-inch-thick manila folder that Barb maintains. It's filled with ephemera collected over the years: notes from admirers, snapshots, clippings from community newsletters.

With the folder as your guide, it's possible to reconstruct the growth of the Colby display. In 1985, a local newspaper noted, the Colbys used 6,800 lights. Animated figures were used for the first time in 1986. In 1988, they switched from outlining the house in blue lights to red (in the process retiring the original electrical helix that Butch bought in Red Wing). By 1990, their light bulb total was up to 13,000. Today, Butch estimates it at three times that.

There's a note from someone who dropped off some cash at the Colbys' house. "Please accept this donation to your December power bill," he wrote, signing it "An appreciative observer." (The Colbys' electricity bill in December is $500, about $300 more than usual.)

Also in the folder is a note from the founder of Columbia himself, James Rouse, and his wife, Patty: "We read about your Christmas lights. . . Drove over tonight to see them. They are magnificent -- a Christmas triumph. We thank you."

Pondering the note, I wonder if Rouse was thanking the Colbys not just for decorating their house, but for doing something that was beyond his power. Rouse had built a simulacrum of a town -- houses and roads and community centers -- but it's a harder thing to create community. That was up to people like Butch and Barb.

And in their own way, the Colbys each year construct a replica: a re-creation of the perfect Christmas. So many of the Colbys' decorations are little versions of holiday celebrations -- a Victorian family gathered around a tree, the tiny china village -- that, in a way, 6428 Deep Calm is just the biggest Christmas bauble.

The whole thing is a bit vertiginous and Escher-like, as if the Colbys' house is part of a giant's snow globe, ready to be shaken up and marveled at.

"People come right up to the front door," says Barb of the visitors drawn to her house. "Somebody said one time they came by and we were sitting at our dining room table eating, and they thought it was so neat to look at the Christmas lights and see this family sitting inside, eating at the table."

I ask Barb how that makes her feel.

"Weird."

LIVING NEAR THE COLBYS HAS THE TENDENCY TO DAMPEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM for decorating your own house.

"There's a great advantage to living in this area," says Larry. "You can go to your wife and say: 'I can't compete with that. Let's just put up two strands.' "

Butch's neighbor Ron Grassel has come to the same conclusion. "It would be kind of a letdown for people, anything we do compared to what he does," he says.

Grassel does have one Christmas tradition, however: He positions a pair of cinder blocks in the corner of his front yard to discourage sightseers from driving on his lawn as they make a three-point turn past the Colbys' house.

"What I learned early on is that people tend to underestimate the turn and they end up turfing the lawn," says Grassel. "That's probably our biggest annoyance."

The Colbys' display also attracts sightseeing buses, some of which combine a trip to Deep Calm with one to the Symphony of Lights at Merriweather Post Pavilion. Sometimes Butch has emerged in the morning to find that someone has taken a baseball bat to parts of his display, or simply unplugged a decoration and skulked off with it.

Butch says he likes to involve local kids in decorating the house. His hope is that when they've grown into teenage delinquents they will spare something they once had a hand in creating.

The Colbys' display hasn't been entirely controversy-free. The homeowners association for their neighborhood -- Owen Brown -- stipulates that all Christmas decorations must be down by January 15. One year the weather was awful in early January. Then Butch had to leave town on a business trip before he had de-Christmased the house.

"So we didn't get them down right away, and we did get a letter from the association," says Barb. "But he told them what they could do with their letter."

"Man, I was very upset with them," says Butch. "I went up to the board in front of the whole Owen Brown committee and read them the riot act. I said I have never seen anything so pathetic in my whole life."

Butch says he thinks it was someone who was "not Christian" who complained to the board, someone who "probably was offended from the very first day" he or she saw the decorations. When pressed about that assumption, Butch says he really has no idea who it was.

What bothered him the most was that, as he sees it, the problem could have been resolved in a more neighborly way. Someone could have walked up to his door and said, Hey what's up? But instead, the Owen Brown board -- his neighbors, the people who had been oohing and aahing at his lights for all those years! -- sent him a letter demanding that the decorations be taken down.

Butch says he went to the next association meeting and said, "We're all pretty much family around here, and you could have come over and talked to me about it. I could have told you why they weren't down."

He would have told them about the ice storm in January and how he was afraid to go up on the roof, and then how he'd had to go to a conference in Arizona.

"When I got back I was planning on taking it down," Butch says, his voice still heavy with hurt and indignation. "But not then. Not anymore."

Butch left the Christmas decorations up until March.

AS TWILIGHT TAKES OVER ON SUNDAY, it is time to test the decorations. Butch walks around the yard, making sure everything is plugged in. Then he walks to the circuit box in the garage and throws the switch. The gloaming stops gloaming, at least on the corner of Windharp and Deep Calm. Though it's only a test, and the lights won't go on officially for a week, cars start to slow and people out for an evening walk drift over, like moths drawn to a particularly attractive bug zapper.

Butch isn't looking at what's lighted. He's looking at what isn't. On the roof of the garage, reindeer Nos. 1 and 4 are out. Butch thinks the filaments must have been broken when the wind smashed the reindeer around. A whole string of red lights is out on the deck. Could be a fuse. One corner of the picket fence is out. Trevor may have nicked the strand with a stapler as he was putting it up.

Over at the manger, one cow, one donkey and one-third of the Wise Men are dark.

But this is all in the nature of fine-tuning, easily fixed with a light bulb or two. The Colby family Christmas display is pretty much finished.

So why do the Colbys do it? Why do they really spend so much time and money to transform their house every year for just a few weeks?

It's not for religious reasons, Butch says, pointing out that there are more Santas than Jesuses in his display.

"I think the enjoyment is just seeing it all come together and light up," he says. "It's kind of an art, putting it together and making it look nice. Some people just throw up stuff, and it kind of looks that way."

Butch knows he can't do it forever. It's a lot of work spending days in the cold, climbing up and down a ladder, scurrying across the roof. How much longer before the plug is pulled on Columbia's Christmas house?

"I think it's when I stop enjoying doing it," says Butch. "I think that's the key. Right now I still enjoy doing it, but someday that will probably change."

Barb thinks that maybe they'll start scaling back soon, not string quite so many lights, not put out quite so many animated figures.

"That's Barb," says Butch. "When I quit, it's just gonna be one year it's just not gonna be up."

There's one thing that Barb knows for sure. "When the lights go down, it's just so dark," she says. "It seems so dark for a while."

John Kelly is a columnist for The Washington Post.