Light Up the Night: Local Christmas Light Displays

ONALASKA — Doug Abrahamson’s love affair with Christmas decorations started innocently enough.

In 1996, he built his wife, DeeDee, a platform on their roof in order to display a wooden Santa sleigh he built her.

And each year, it seemed, a few more lights and a few more features popped up at their home near Onalaska Elementary School.

“Then when the grandkids came along, it just took off,” Abrahamson said with a smile, admiring the display that now takes up his entire yard.

The Abrahamsons’ home is a little off the main drag, but once you find it, a winter wonderland awaits you. Abrahamson, a teacher at Onalaska High School, said he first started putting up Christmas lights to brighten the dark winter nights.

“When I first started there wasn’t anybody else down here,” Abrahamson said. “It was so dark and dreary coming down the alley at night.”

Today, the display is so large Abrahamson starts working on it the last week of October in order to have it all up and running by December. He said he’s not much for Halloween decorations so he said the cleanup from that holiday is rather quick and allows him to get a jump start on Christmas.

The display’s most striking feature is dozens of large wooden cutouts of figures including: Winnie the Pooh; the Peanuts gang; the characters from the Island of Misfit Toys; a nativity scene and Sesame Street. One tree in the yard is also filled with small cutouts of various superheroes. One of the larger installations is Abrahamson’s shed at the back of the property, which is transformed into Santa’s workshop, complete with elves, presents and Santa checking his Christmas list.

“He designed it to get out of your car and walk around,” DeeDee said.

Some of the more unique features of the yard display are ingenious designs from Abrahamson’s imagination. A string of lights stuck into half-full milk jugs illuminate the home’s driveway. There are small Christmas trees made from upside down tomato cages wrapped in strings of lights. Another Christmas tree is made from large tin cans secured together with lights punched through the back.

“I was working at the fair at the corn dog place to make money for all this and I saved the ketchup and mustard cans and made this,” Abrahamson said.

Though Abrahamson said he does not keep track, he said he would estimate there are between 10,000 and 15,000 lights in the display. The family estimates the endeavor runs them somewhere between $300-$400 extra in light bills each year, which Abrahamson helps offset by doing extra work during his summer breaks. But they said the cost is pretty manageable for the gift of making local children smile.

And the advent of LED lights certainly helped. The Abrahamsons and their children still vividly recall the days long ago when the  tremendous light display meant they had to be careful what they turned on at night for fear of blowing a circuit. An addition to the back of the home was built to include separate switches for the outside lights to further help the power situation.

“I remember once someone tried to turn the vacuum on at night and it was like, ‘OK, nope, can’t do that,’” he said with a laugh.