Tammy Wright starts her Christmas decorating on Thanksgiving.

It’s easier to erect a perimeter fence and hammer swooping arches over a driveway before the ground is frozen. Time is also needed when you’re converting a 6-metre flagpole into a giant conical tree, transforming retaining walls into scenes worthy of the North Pole and festooning a “Merry Christmas” sign to your roof that’s big enough to be read by passengers aboard a descending plane.

It takes Wright four days just to drape her porch with garlands and wreaths. The extension cords, which are stored off-season in seven oversized tote bins, require another two days of logistical snaking. Then there are the glowing lawn creatures and ornaments — stockings, reindeer, polar bears, candy canes, elves, lollipops, stars, gift boxes — that need to be assembled and tricked out with LED lights. This wooden menagerie twinkles around a centrepiece sleigh and is scattered under a dazzling cavalcade of red, green, gold and blue lights that now attracts visitors from as faraway as Russia and Ireland.

Put it this way: the Christmas tree in Rockfeller Center, a hulking Norway spruce that climbs 23 metres into the New York City skyline, is illuminated by 45,000 bulbs. There are nearly twice as many lights outside Wright’s house in Pickering.

This extreme decorating started in 2004 when Wright’s parents, who were living in the United States, sent over two inflatable yard characters — an 8-foot tall Santa and equally big Frosty. Wright and her husband, Chris, placed them in the front yard, mostly to amuse their children, daughter Natalie and twin boys Robert and James.

But within a few hours, Santa and Frosty were creating gridlock in Pickering.

“People started driving by at all hours,” recalls Wright, 40. “My husband said, ‘We’re getting a lot of traffic here just for these silly blow-up things.’ Then he said, ‘Well, let’s try something.’”

Eager to turn the silly blow-up things into a serious throwdown for charity, an empty box with “Community Food Bank” scrawled on the side was dragged to the end of the driveway.

“When we got up in the morning, there was actually quite a bit of food in the box,” says Wright. “We were totally surprised. But from then on, we just kind of went nuts. We just started adding more and more decorations.”

What happened next was the opposite of what social scientists sometimes refer to as broken windows theory. The lavishly decorated home at 1289 Ilona Park Rd. inspired neighbours to get out and adorn their own houses. It became a festive hub, bringing out the best in everyone.

The Wright kids have grown — Natalie is now 22, Robert and James are 13 — and over the years so has the display. The family now stand out in the cold nightly, giving candy canes to strangers. The ceremonial “Light Up” on Dec. 1 attracted more than 300 people. Closer to Christmas, the number of daily visitors will tip past 1,000.

There have been out-of-town light seekers and tour buses. Many neighbourhood kids refuse to go to bed each night until they’ve seen the display. As for the cost of providing this entertainment, Wright’s hydro bill last December went up by about $300 — a relatively small increase due to the energy-efficient LEDs.

As she wryly observes: “I don’t know if I could afford to this incandescently.”

Last year, the Wrights raised $6,500 in cash and 3,500 pounds of non-perishables for the St. Paul’s on-the-hill food bank. This year, the goal is to surpass $10,000.

“There are two joys for me,” says Wright. “The biggest being the amount of food and money that we get for the local food bank. But this is also one of the few things that I’ve come across in life that breaks all barriers — religion, race, colour, anything. Everyone enjoys it.”

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Tuesday: Finding joy in faith

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