A Whole Lotta Light

Hattie Lee is one of those people who takes Christmas decorations very seriously. “Oh, I just love the way the lights twinkle in the windows,” she says in a warm New Orleans drawl. The 64-year-old great-grandmother also loves the look of the giant plastic angels perched on her roof, and the way her front lawn transforms each year into a cabaret of dancing Santas, entertaining wise men, snowmen, and incandescent plastic shepherds.

At Lee’s modest house near Carol City Senior High School, the lights start going up in October. Laboring in the evenings to avoid the heat, she checks every string for burned-out bulbs. Even the bars over each window and her front fence blink with multicolor lights. “That’s the hardest part,” she notes. She uses tiny bulbs to cut down on electricity costs, which she says aren’t too high. By Veteran’s Day most of the display is up, though Lee doesn’t turn on the juice until Thanksgiving. Once her yard is illuminated, she rarely ventures outside at night.

“It’s not peaceful,” she explains. “People come over all the time. Some open the gate. They ask me how long it took to put up the lights and how much it costs and why I do it. I tell ’em I put ’em up for my patients, but that just leads to more questions.”

For more years than she can remember, Lee has hosted up to five tenants in her home at 3061 NW 186th Terr. Most of her peoples, as she fondly calls them, are severely mentally retarded. The state pays her a nominal fee to care for them. This morning she awoke just after 5:00 to prepare a pancake breakfast. “I’m going out tomorrow to buy them some presents,” she adds. “I love all the holidays with my peoples. I love Christmas. I love to watch them open up their presents.”

James is one of her patients. A taciturn man in a comfortably worn baseball cap and windbreaker, he maintains the Christmas display, a job he undertakes with pride. Patrolling the front yard following a recent evening’s light rain, he searches for and replaces burned-out bulbs. Stepping lightly over a phalanx of wires, he returns dignity to an overturned plastic snowman. With confidence that the rains are not going to recur, he retrieves Lee’s animated Santa collection from inside the house for display on a small front-lawn stage. One Santa sings “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.” Another blows bubbles. Yet another hip-shaking Santa is dressed in red long johns and a cowboy hat. A fourth appears ready for a round of golf.

Lee surveys her display with a critical eye, then shakes her head. A string of small twinkle lights near her front door is not working. Nor is the lighting inside one of the three wise men. And the head of an angel poking a bugle through an intricately illuminated grating in her front fence is dark. “Ooh, James, you see that angel? You’ve got to see, uh, James, see the angel right here? I don’t know if the bulb is gone, but she ain’t on.”

A tall, rail-thin man with a head of white hair steps outside to join the maintenance project. He declines to give his last name. “Just call me Mr. George,” he says with a wink, as he ignites a long cigarette. Mr. George moved in with Lee five years ago, more or less. He was so drunk at the time he doesn’t know how he got here. Maybe he was a ward of the state. Then again, maybe not. “I was a wino,” he recalls, taking a drag from his cigarette. “They say it’s a miracle I’m even alive. [Ms. Lee] tells me it was God who saved me, but I always say that it was you, Ms. Lee, who did the nursing.” Then he addresses a visitor. “She’s a terrific lady. She is an angel.”

Lee blushes and hugs George. “Oh, I just do my job,” she tells him, pulling his body close to hers. “This is my job to do.” The two are so affectionate that they appear to be romantically involved. “GOOD GOD NO!” cries Lee, when asked whether their relationship is intimate. “I’m 64 years old. I’m a great-grandmother. My husband has been dead for years. Good God no; I am tired! I am too old for that!”

Now that the rain has stopped, the onlookers slowly return. From Thanksgiving through New Year’s day, cars parade down NW 186th Terrace in slow motion, drivers’ mouths agape, childrens’ faces pressed against the windows. Between dusk and midnight, when the lights are turned on for the evening, couples, families, and packs of young kids stroll past. “Oooh, look at that one,” coos a boy, pointing at a miniature motorized Santa sleigh pulled by eight reindeer over a snowy village of gingerbread homes, cars, churches, and gazebos.

An electric locomotive chugs through the winter landscape. “Do you see the train?” the boy’s father asks excitedly. He is not looking at Lee’s display, but at the even more intricate display of her next-door neighbors, the Mitchells. For years the Mitchells have been in a friendly competition with the house directly across the street, owned by the Gashins. So spectacular are their displays that Lee’s extraordinary spread might be overlooked as nothing special. On her roof, for instance, three large plastic angels are illuminated in blue and white splendor. On top of the Mitchell house are twelve identical angels, plus a dozen more angels of a different style, plus a glowing white cross. In their front yard is a 34-piece plastic choir, which is covered in cottony white snow. An unseen sound system pumps out a rich diet of gospel carols. The centerpiece of the Mitchell display is a cityscape, which features not only a flying Kris Kringle, but also a motorized ski gondola.

“I ain’t never seen it,” Lee says of her neighbor’s street scene, which is protected from rain and wind by a massive tarp almost as big as the house itself. She is standing less than twenty feet away from her rival Christmas celebrant. “People tell me it’s real pretty, but I’ve just never gone over there.” She says she’s not competitive with her neighbors. “I can’t keep up with those people.” Lee snickers when she learns that the Mitchells have erected a box for donations. “I don’t ask nobody for money,” she says. “Nobody asked me to put these up. I put them up for my people. You want ’em happy. This is what keeps ’em happy. As long as my peoples got lights, I’m happy.”