Deck the Streets : Neighborhood Goes All Out With Decorations, but Some Complain of Gawkers and Traffic

Some people look at Bob Ellis’ house on Reese Road in Torrance and see a Christmas wonderland of Santa Clauses and reindeer and snowmen and candy canes and thousands of twinkling lights. They see Christmas carolers and holiday cheer and the bright, shining, happy faces of children.

Other people look at Bob Ellis’ house, and all the other lavishly decorated houses in the neighborhood, and see nothing but a big fat Christmas pain in the neck.

“It generates a lot of goodwill,” Ellis, 47, a firefighter for the city of Redondo Beach, said of the gala Christmas display that he and his neighbors--most of his neighbors, anyway--put on every year.

“It’s hell,” countered another Reese Road resident who is tired of having the street in front of his home turned into a slow-moving river of drivers and pedestrians gawking at Bob Ellis’ Christmas lights.

Until about eight years ago, the 5400 block of Reese Road was a more or less normal middle-class neighborhood during the holidays. Sure, there were some Christmas decorations on the houses, but it was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that would attract gazers from miles around.

Then someone--accounts differ as to who--started draping strings of small white Christmas lights from some of the Chinese elm trees that line the street. Neighbors thought that looked nice, so they started draping white Christmas lights on their Chinese elms, too. Pretty soon every house on the block had white lights hanging from the elms.

But it did not stop there. Apparently the Christmas decoration bug, once released into a population, is difficult to keep in check. The white-lights-on-elms motif started spreading to surrounding streets--Doris Way, Robert Road, Carol Drive, Sharynne Lane, Linda Drive and other streets in the neighborhood known as Seaside Ranchos.

Eventually, more than 200 homes in the area began sporting unusually large displays of Christmas lights. And every year the decorations became more and more elaborate as neighbor vied with neighbor to see who could load up the old homestead with the most Christmas stuff.

Unofficially, Bob Ellis’ two-story house would appear to be a contender for top honors this year. He has a Santa Claus on the roof with a couple of reindeer, and two snowmen made out of painted tumbleweeds on the front lawn. Blue lights on his fence spell out “NOEL.” Candy canes line his porch. When you ring the doorbell it plays a chimes rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”

All this is in addition to the 8,000 Christmas lights draped all over his house and yard. That is not a record in the annals of Christmas light mania--an Agoura Hills man, for example, has more than 100,000 Christmas lights on his house. But it’s still a lot of lights, enough lights to cost Ellis an extra $200 on his December electricity bill.

Ellis approaches Christmas decorating with the intensity, some might say the obsessiveness, of a recent convert.

“For years I was a bah-humbugger,” Ellis said. “But now I really get into it.”

Of course, Ellis is not the only one who gets into it. From shortly after Thanksgiving until New Year’s, almost every house and tree on Reese Road is covered with lights and other Christmas decorations. And vast crowds of people are eager to see them.

Even on a weekday night, the traffic coursing through the streets in the neighborhood is heavy; on weekend nights the traffic is bumper-to-bumper with carloads of sightseers. According to Lt. Mike Hertica of the Torrance Police Department, anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 cars pass through the neighborhood in the two weeks before Christmas, an average of up to about 7,000 cars a night. Hundreds of pedestrians crowd the sidewalks.

“It (the traffic) is a problem, but not a difficult one,” said Hertica, adding that most of the people who visit are good-natured. Although there have been some thefts of Christmas decorations in past years, no serious crimes have been related to the annual light display, Hertica said.

But for at least one resident of the 5400 block of Reese Road, other people’s Christmas wonderland has become a personal Christmas nightmare.

The man in question does not want his name used. But his identity is hardly a secret to his neighbors, since his is one of only two houses on the block with no Christmas display of any kind. He does not want people calling him a Scrooge, so for the sake of simplicity, we’ll call him Ebenezer.

Ebenezer insists that he likes Christmas as much as the next guy, assuming the next guy isn’t, say, Bob Ellis. But he thinks the traffic situation--and the accompanying noise and air pollution--has gotten out of hand.

“This is light,” said Ebenezer, a late middle-aged man with a gray beard, as he waved his hand toward the street where a stream of cars slowly moved by. “This is nothing. Some nights it’s so bad you can’t get across the street. You can’t get out of your driveway. I don’t know how an emergency vehicle could get in here if it had to. And then there’s the kids driving by with their boom boxes. It’s just out of control.”

Ebenezer admits that he has not always felt this way.

“Yeah, I used to risk breaking my neck to put them (Christmas lights) up,” he said. “But then some of the people around here started getting pushy about it, so this year I decided not to. Aw, I guess I might put up a wreath or two, just to show I’m not a total Scrooge. I’m not immune to Christmas joy. I’m just tired of all this damn traffic!”

“He gets a little grumpy this time of year,” one of Ebenezer’s neighbors said.

In fact, the number of neighborhood residents participating in the annual Christmas light gala has been decreasing in recent years, particularly in the streets furthest from Reese Road. The most likely reason is that people are getting tired of the traffic. Even some of the people who started the Christmas decorating frenzy on Reese Road are starting to have mixed feelings about what they have wrought.

“I’m almost afraid to say that we were in on the beginning of it,” said Diane Solomon, a longtime Reese Road resident who has upward of 4,000 lights on her house. “The traffic does get to be a problem sometimes.”

Solomon’s husband, Bob, on the other hand, does not mind a bit.

“For all the joy it brings to so many people, it’s worth a little inconvenience,” Bob Solomon said.

Bob Ellis agrees.

“It’s amazing when you see the little kids’ faces,” he said. “They see this and their faces just light up. That’s what it’s all about. That makes it all worth it.”