1.5 million Christmas lights

How many lights do you need for a real-life Christmas fairy tale? We don’t know the exact number, but a million and a half probably makes the cut.

In the small Croatian town of Čazma, a few thousand Christmas lights would make your house stand out from the rest. But retired engineer Zlatko Salaj wanted to make sure his family has the most Christmasy atmosphere ever, so he adorned his house and estate with an incredible number of lights — 1,500,000, he claims.

It's a spectacle, further emphasized by the lack of lighting in the area. An evening drive towards Salaj’s home, located a few miles east from Čazma, is fairly uneventful. Making the last turn around a small hill, a huge globe of foggy light will emerge from the dark — as if someone had taken New York’s Times Square and placed it on a meadow in rural Croatia.

Around 1.5 million lights — the Salaj family does not know the exact number, though they’re sure this figure is very close — hardly fit on a single house. To accommodate his ever-expanding light show, Salaj and his family placed lights on basically everything they could — several houses, a barn, the trees, the bushes, a bridge crossing a creek, the meandering paths surrounding a small lake — everything.

The "Christmas tale of Salaj family," a family estate adorned with 1.5 million lights near Cazma, Croatia. Image: Mashable

The estate spans across 19 acres — around 14 football fields — and though it's not all covered in lights, it seems like the spectacle never ends. Sometimes uneven but always breathtaking, every new set of lights made us wonder how much effort, hard work and insane electricity bills had to go into the project.

Sitting behind a modest table in his guest house, with a wide smile on his face and a firm shake of hand, Salaj reveals how his hobby turned into a fully-fledged business.

"I started in 2001, with 70,000 lights, and kept adding more ever since. I was poor growing up; I've worked abroad, and once I retired, I wanted to provide the best Christmas ever to my family. And people from the village started showing up, timid at first. I invited them all in. Now, it's a huge amount of work. But I can't just stop and tell everyone that there won't be any lights at the Salaj family this year," he says.

"This year, there was a lot of rain. We had to work in the rain and the mud, because we wouldn't finish on time. And once the lights are turned off in January, we immediately start working for next year."

There are other problems. The electricity bill rose up to 70,000 HRK ($11,100) last year, and Salaj was lucky to have the electric company install a new substation nearby a few years back, providing enough electricity to power the light show. The project is partly financed from sponsorships, and partly from entrance fees, but most of the money and work to keep it up throughout the years was put in by the Salaj family themselves.

There are hardly any corners at Salaj's estate without Christmas lights. A restored old mill is no exception. Image: Mashable

Salaj's numbers are unofficial, but we've seen Guinness records being awarded for far less Christmas lights than he claims — for 1.2 million in a shopping mall in Canberra this November, and for 600,000 for "most lights on a residential property" in New York. Salaj is not interested, at least not at this moment.

"Obtaining a Guinness record is not cheap. I'd rather use the money to put up more Christmas lights, make more people and children happy," he says. Project head Ana Bertić chimes in: "We're thinking about it. When we're ready, we might go for it, but not right now."

No matter the official number, the light show on the Salaj estate is attracting an increasing number of visitors, even from abroad. "This year, we might hit 80,000 visitors," says Salaj. "We're constantly expanding the show; this year, we launched an illuminated smurf village and improved the lighting in several places. We've added 300,000 new lights."

Zlatko Salaj stands in front of a Santa Claus figure at his estate. As soon as the lights are shut down in January, he'll start preparing for the Easter light show, which includes 10,000 illuminated Easter eggs. Image: Mashable

Is there an end in sight, a final number of Christmas lights to hit? Salaj doesn't really care about numbers. "We'll never stop expanding it. You see my son here, he will continue the work after I am not able. One day, we might illuminate the entire forest."