Holiday cheer doesn't come cheap
Written by: | 3 Dec 2008
If you’ve ever driven down Whipple Street at night during the holidays, you’ve seen it. Easily visible from the main road, the Holiday House lights up everything around it.
The owner of the home, Betsy Chance, loves decorating her home every year and says, “You know people appreciate it, yelling out the window ‘we love your lights’… they do that when you’re out there, at least you know that they enjoy it.”
Chance has always loved decorating her home with lights. She and her housemate started decorating their home when they “…rented a place the first year, which was 11 years ago, on Marina Street and got really carried away,” says Chance.
Getting started
Then Chance moved to her current location off Whipple Street. “We got this place and I had this entire yard and I just couldn’t resist.” Now 11 years later it has become a tradition.
“Now, we’ve got a set up… he’s programmed all the music that goes with the lights,” says Chance. Her housemate does all the computer programming on a program called Light-O-Rama. He programs the lights to shift to a tenth of a second, to the holiday music they play in the evenings.
The lights are in layers of color on the roof; they cover the siding, the trees and pretty much every tangible nook and cranny.
Chance prefers colored lights. “Colors are my thing, not white. White is beautiful but it just doesn’t bring out the excitement for me, and I don’t think for other people.”
“Colors are my thing, not white. White is beautiful but it just doesn’t bring out the excitement for me…”
The costs
Over the years Chance has had to upgrade her electrical system to support all the lights. She has also upgraded the cording on the lights to a more industrial grade.
“I had to have a whole new electrical thing. But now I have everything outside. We have four breaker boxes with plug-ins.” Those four breaker boxes are in addition to the original breaker box on the house which is now reserved for household use and to run the computer and sound system.
The Holiday House has become an investment for Chance. On an average year Chance spends $3,000 to $4,000 on new decorations. “I go after [Christmas] too, so I get it 50 percent off,” she says. But, “The one year we did [upgrade] the electrical it was …$5,000.”
There’s also the added cost of the electricity to run all of the lights. “Last year it was only like $50 extra for the month and of course I leave it for several months. To me it’s no big deal; if you’re going to buy lights you’re going to buy electricity; they seem to go hand and hand.”
The cost is all worth it to Chance. “A lot of people say ‘how can you stand those electricity bills?’ and I say ‘well because I love the lights, I love the electricity,’” she says.
The set-up
Chance always decorates for Christmas and makes a point of leaving the decorations up well after Christmas so everyone gets the opportunity to see them. She also works hard to get the lights up early. “I have three weeks to do it in and have to have it all up. Usually we try to get the music up on Thanksgiving,” she says.
It is always a crunch every year meeting her deadline. “I work all day; it’s only evenings that I can decorate,” says Chance.
Chance prefers to decorate in the evenings because she can get an idea of how the decorations look as she’s putting them up. This is important because she has a hard time not using all of her decorations, which are overflowing in several storage sheds. “I appreciate all of it, but you can’t have it all.”
Not just for Christmas
And all that is just for the Christmas decorations. Chance also decorates for Halloween. “Usually on the Saturday before [Halloween] I try to open it up for everyone to walk through.” she says.
Chance and her housemate recruit people to help them on that Saturday before Halloween. Volunteers pull on strings that drop down scary decorations from the trees in the yard and off the roof.
“Now of course, I don’t know where to stop,” says Chance. She says she’ll keep decorating for the foreseeable future.
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