Companies Offer Holiday Decor Help

Americans will likely spend more than $16.5 billion on decorations for all holidays in 2006, compared with $15.8 billion last year, according to Pam Danzinger of Pennsylvania-based Unity Marketing which tracks consumer holiday spending. In 2005, Americans spent $8.5 billion on Christmas decorations alone.

The number of households hiring Christmas decorators is less than 1 percent, and are concentrated in the country's richest neighborhoods, Danzinger said.

Freeman said while his business is growing, the market for professional decorators is largely untapped.

For some amateur decorators who decide to do it themselves, holiday decorating becomes a year-round cycle, with the costs incalculable, ongoing, and pricier than any other hobby.

"I don't want our yard to be a carbon copy of everybody else's," said Debbie Hansen, whose La Vista, Neb. house display includes Peanuts figurines, moving animals and about 36,000 lights _ including about 15,000 hooked up to a sophisticated system that uses a computer program to coordinate the lights to music.

"You can't just go out and look at Christmas lights anymore," Hansen said. "They have to be doing something."

Professional displays can also dance and dazzle, but aren't as unique, according to Marc Hansen, Debbie's husband.

"It kind of loses the home feeling," he said. "It's still a very beautiful display, there's no doubt about it. But we try not to duplicate too many things, we actually make some of the things ourselves, which makes it real fun."

To accommodate their annual display, the Hansens work year-round planning, take time off of work to assemble the display, and have even made modifications to their house to accommodate Christmas stuff they've acquired over the years _ including extra hardware and items that get rotated in and out of the yard.

Head said his professional lights help build on a limited tradition from his own childhood, without the yearly hassle.

"They would be the old-fashioned big bulbs _ I don't know if you remember those days _ but we would put some of those out on the porch, but we didn't put them on the roof," Head said. "My mom didn't want my dad getting up on the roof."