The Gift of the Kaplans : An Agoura Hills family brightens spirits and the neighborhood with a dazzling holiday light show for all faiths.

On the first week of Christ-mas, the Kap-lans give to us thou-sands of lights, four fog ma-chines, two fla-vored scents, one la-ser show, a ro-botic Santa and more crowds than a Toys “R” Us.

Drive right up, every body!

Bring one toy so a child’s face can light up--just like the Kaplans’ place at 5831 Grey Rock Road, where holiday cheer is on the house and all over the front yard!

See 175,000 lights (55,000 more than last year) twinkling in the night and enough flashing lasers to make the neighbors wonder if UFOs have landed!

Listen to a life-size, automated Santa Claus tease a few onlookers with one-liners such as: “I’m the robotic 2000, and I’m an experimental project being built by the scientists at NASA.”

It’s all so dazzling that you’d think Donald and Joanne Kaplan and their four children should give away sunglasses to everyone, especially to dear old Santa, whose winters at the North Pole hardly ever see the light of day.

It’s an extravaganza viewed by thousands of sightseers every December and by countless more on TV news clips around the world. It’s bigger, brighter and better this year than all the others dating back to 14 Christmases ago, when the Kaplans strung up their house in Woodland Hills with a handful of lights that soon grew to 8,000.

And now, everything is so garishly theatrical outside the Kaplans’ Tudor mansion (five bedrooms, six baths) that the holiday spirit seems packaged by the ghosts of Walt Disney and the Ringling Bros., if not orchestrated by a posse from Las Vegas’ Glitter Gulch.

“We estimated that 75,000 people passed the house during all of last December,” says Donald Kaplan, a developer and investor, his 55-year-old face aglow like that of a 5-year-old as he talks about the family’s light show. “This year, the crowds are going to be a lot bigger.”

How much bigger, brighter and better can the Kaplans’ light show get? What can they do for an encore?

The Kaplans’ 24-year-old son Drew, who choreographs much of it from an electronic control board he built inside the house, grins and says: “We keep adding more and more. And each year, we’ve always said, ‘This is going to be our last year doing this.’ ”

The Kaplans won’t say how much it costs to order or build all these lights, props and gadgets--and to store them in leased space.

“We don’t like to flaunt any figures,” says Donald Kaplan. “In essence, there’s a little Santa in all of us--and this just brings the Santa out.”

The only figure the Kaplans do reveal is the one on their December electricity bill, which they expect to go up--to as high as $150 a day (from $135 a day last year). They point out, too, that they overloaded the circuitry so badly last winter that they had to rent a 30-kilowatt movie-studio generator, powered by a 250-gallon tank of diesel fuel, just to light up half the display and to keep power from shutting off inside the house.

Drew Kaplan, meanwhile, delights in bantering over two-way speakers with visitors who cannot see him seated inside the house, wearing headphones, as the voice of Santa the robot: “Hello. . . . Would you please sing the Kaplan family a Christmas song? And I’ll record it!”

And year after year, he derives even greater thrills adding bells, whistles, smoke, mirrors and other wizardry reminiscent of that frizzy-haired scientist in the film “Back to the Future.”

“It was kind of my job to put up the Christmas lights each year,” he recalls of his childhood. “And I kept asking, ‘Can we put some more lights up this year?’ Here, we moved into a bigger house (in 1985), so when we put the lights on it, it looked like nothing. I mean absolutely nothing.”

To an exterior emblazoned with 40,000 lights (but no other decor) as recently as 1989, they’ve added toy soldiers, illuminated elves, gingerbread figurines, candy canes and candlesticks, background music over 10 speakers and special effects such as lasers, vanilla and popcorn aromas and fog machines to simulate smoke belching from a miniature train and from a chimney atop Santa’s workshop.

This year, the Kaplans themed their show “Christmas in Camelot” and ordered up make-believe, 13th-Century-style castle towers so tall (27 feet) that they had to be lowered into place by a small crane.

They’ve also cranked up an illuminated cuckoo clock with a 14-by-14-foot face, spewed more artificial smoke and added toy soldiers to their special effects, each with animated arms and clasping trumpets.

It’s a process that the Kaplans say takes 900 hours: crafting new props in September, stringing up lights starting in mid-October and building the rest of the display through November.

To make everything light up these December nights, it’s all but taken an act of Congress. The Kaplans say they obtained a temporary permit from Southern California Edison Co. to add a separate 200-amp electrical system to their 400 amps already on hand.

“No home is allowed to have two electric services,” Donald Kaplan says, “so we had to sign something that says we’ll use it only for the Christmas display. Now we have 400 amps to run our show, which leaves us 200 to run the house.”

What’s more, as if toy soldiers weren’t enough, the Kaplans have even called in the Marines.

For the second year in a row, the house is a collection center for the U.S. Marine Corps’ Toys for Tots campaign--with a goal of 5,000 toys from visitors to the Kaplans’ light show.

The first tidal wave of spectators--about 3,000 strong--arrived on the night of Dec. 1 to see the Kaplans snap on the lights and to watch, for the first time, a kickoff parade up Grey Rock Road, complete with Marine Corps Reserves honor guard, the Agoura High School band and flag girls, city officials and local Boy Scout and Cub Scout groups, preceded by children from Willow Elementary and Lindero Middle schools singing carols. To offer first aid, if needed, attendants from the Agoura Hills Disaster Response Team stood by, but reported no casualties.

Spectators received free candy canes and coupons good for discount meals at the Agoura Hills outlet of Johnny Rockets, a 1950s-style diner. An electronic message board said the Kaplans are donating to Toys for Tots “a portion” of proceeds from telephone calls (maximum charge per call: $5) to a special prerecorded information hot line--(900) 786-LITE--which gives directions, hours the display is lighted and the night when Santa will pay a pre-Christmas Eve visit.

As for traffic control (provided by the city), the Kaplans figure that they’ll need more than the four sheriff’s deputies who helped last year, especially during peak nights the week before Christmas and until New Year’s night, when the lights are finally shut off. All the more reason, the Kaplans say, to mobilize a few Marine Reserves.

“You’ve heard of Disneyland?” Drew Kaplan asks good-naturedly. “The next ‘land’ is going to be Kaplanland.”

On the bus-iest week of Christ-mas, the Kap-lans give to us rein-deer a-flying, sol-diers a-drumming, a toy train a-smoking, sight-seers a-gawking and some neigh-bors mak-ing a fuss. Sally Glade, who lives down the hill from the Kaplans, says the traffic on Grey Rock Road became “very difficult” last December, forcing her to stay a couple of nights with relatives elsewhere in Agoura Hills.

“We couldn’t get into our driveway,” she recalls. “People turned our street into a parking lot.”

She sighs, adding: “All you can do is grin and bear it. We look forward to it being over.”

By contrast, neighbor Sharon Stewart describes the Kaplans’ light show as “absolutely great!”

“We thoroughly enjoy it,” she says, adding that her 10-year-old son “can hardly wait to see the house with all the lights. We walk up there five or six times to look at it. I’d feel very badly if they didn’t do it.”

Paula Graybill, who initially lived across from the Kaplans but later moved farther up the street, says the light show “is not the reason we moved. Yes, it could be frustrating, but my kids loved it. And my relatives insisted on seeing it. Some of them in Nebraska said they saw it on TV!”

One neighbor, at first, describes the show as “almost obscene,” complaining of “traffic, noise and the smell of gasoline.”

Later, she telephones a reporter to tone down her sentiments.

“It doesn’t cost anything, and it makes a lot of people happy,” she says, adding, however, that “it makes you almost a prisoner in your own house.”

For his part, Donald Kaplan concedes that “we’ve become a real pain in the neighborhood. I think they resent it on the one hand, but their kids really appreciate it. . . . But I know we’ve created a real traffic problem.”

Less an issue, the Kaplans say, is their religious faith--as Jews who celebrate the eight days of Hanukkah (a laser-animated menorah flickers in an upstairs window) as well as the season of Christmas.

When he was a child, growing up a third-generation native Californian, Donald says, his parents allowed him to observe both traditions.

“The real season, the real spirit,” he says, “is when everyone celebrates Christmas. We try to bring in all faiths here. I don’t want to wall out anyone. I don’t want to offend anybody. I just want everybody to get into that holiday spirit.”

Drew Kaplan contends that religion is “less important now” than it was when his father was younger. He recalls showing a videotape of the Kaplans’ light show to a man who is Jewish.

“Why don’t you bring your family?” Drew says he asked the man.

Then he quoted the man as saying: “It’s ironic that you’re Jewish and you’re putting on this tremendous show for the Gentiles. I’m not going to bring my son.”

Drew shakes his head. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” he says.

Donald nods reassuringly.

“When the man’s son gets old enough,” he tells Drew, “he’ll go out and see for himself.”

Indeed, the Kaplans have seen and heard for themselves. Their light show introduces them each year to the season’s agonies and ecstasies.

They say vandals disrupted the display last year during the wee hours after all those twinkling lights were turned off for the night, removing bulbs and causing entire strings of lights to stay dark. And 24 hours before the Kaplans switched on the lights this year on Dec. 1, they reported that someone stole one of those 30 gingerbread figurines. “We’ve put in five security cameras with recording devices--and we’ll show the tapes to the Sheriff’s Department,” Donald says.

And a story circulates about a visitor who groused last year at an electronic message touting the Kaplans’ $135-a-day electricity bill: “I don’t even make that in a week.”

But the annoyances, the Kaplans say, pale alongside the joys--the planning for 1994 (“We plan to put a snow machine up on the roof,” Donald says), the children who scrawl thank-you letters to them, the inspirational story of a woman who, they say, lost her husband and job and verged on suicide in 1990, only for a friend to tell her about the light show.

“She visited our house and saw the show,” Donald Kaplan recalls. “She got out of the mood she was in. She went home, got the boxes of Christmas ornaments out and started decorating.”

To the Kaplans of Grey Rock Road, the story’s happy ending brightens their own lives like lasers in the night, a light show for all seasons.

Where and When

What: Christmas lights at the Kaplans’ residence, 5831 Grey Rock Road, Agoura Hills.

Hours: Light show: 6 p.m. to midnight, Sundays through Thursdays, and 6 p.m. to 1 a.m., Fridays and Saturdays, through Jan. 1.

Price: Free. Visitors may contribute a toy to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Toys for Tots campaign.

Call: (900) 786-LITE. (A maximum of $5 per call may be charged.)