The thrill...the bill

On Candy Cane Lane in Woodland Hills, known most of the year as Lubao Avenue, homeowner Kristi Hawley has a secret. Every holiday season, the longtime resident plots her every move when hordes of visitors jam the street nightly to see the ornately decorated neighborhood.

“We have a secret route in and out of here,” said Hawley in a hushed tone. “I can’t share that information, though,” she added with a smile.

That intelligence would have spared her neighbor, Bill Rush, a $35 parking ticket a few years ago when in desperation he parked facing the wrong direction on a nearby street.

“If you run out of groceries during this time of year, you’re in a world of hurting,” Rush said. “We have to plan way ahead before going out.”

Homeowners who live along Candy Cane Lane, Long Beach’s Naples canals, Christmas Tree Lane in Altadena and other elaborately decorated enclaves endure an endless parade of cars, awestruck gawkers, vendors hawking neon necklaces and buses disgorging camera-toting tourists who sometimes confuse flowerbeds for walkways and bushes for toilets. Then there are the families who jump out of cars and dash across residents’ lawns to be photographed with mechanical Santas, oversized reindeer and holographic sleighs.

Add to that the homeowners’ desire every year to be the best and most elaborate. Rush and his wife started out 16 years ago with homemade and hand-painted plywood cutouts. Now his frontyard boasts a $600 mechanical Santa with an $800 house and a $300 Mrs. Claus.

There are neighbors, of course, who prefer to skip the decorations for religious, financial or other reasons. And that’s OK with the rest of the block. Real life hardly imitates the zany antics in the film “Christmas With the Kranks,” in which neighbors ostracize and harass one family after they decide to forgo the holiday for a Caribbean vacation.

But spats do occur. After neighbors in Monte Sereno, Calif., complained about the traffic drawn by Alan and Bonnie Aerts’ $150,000 frontyard extravaganza, the Silicon Valley city passed an ordinance requiring a permit for holding a large-scale event. This year, the Aerts instead erected a 10-foot-tall, $2,500 Grinch with green fuzz and beet-red eyeballs, which points to the house of the neighbor who initiated the complaint.

Buyers of homes on acknowledged holiday-lane enclaves should know what they’re getting into before they move in. Disclosure rules require that sellers give information to prospective owners about the holiday’s effect on the neighborhood, said Merle Derse, a White House Properties agent and eight-year resident of Candy Cane Lane.

Most buyers choose homes in these areas because they like the seasonal activities. It would be difficult to endure those weeks otherwise, homeowners say.

“When I first brought my kids here, years ago, I thought, ‘Are these homeowners nuts?’ ” said Pam Grimes, who subsequently joined their ranks and is celebrating her second Candy Cane Lane season. Nearby streets have adopted equally fanciful monikers, such as Avenue of the Bells and Candle Light Lane. “You have to be in the Christmas spirit to live here. And we are.”

Holiday-lane decorating can run from the mundane to the magnificent. And it doesn’t come cheap.

“One customer here spent $25,000 for luxury outdoor decorations, and another one paid $10,000 for a Nativity set,” said Abbas Sorbi, manager of Stats, a year-round seasonal store in Pasadena. “The average customer spends at least $150 just on lights.” A popular item this year, according to Sorbi’s boss, Damon Stathatos, was a life-sized nutcracker, at $4,500.

This year, consumers will spend $8 billion on holiday decorations -- $623 million alone on outdoor lights, according to trend-tracking Unity Marketing. That’s an overall increase of 4.5% over last year.

Utilities amp up the expense. Rush’s water and power bills run $400 higher during the holidays, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared with the $1,700 he spent on decorations.

The more complicated the decorations, the greater the urge to hire someone to set them up. Vic Irwin and Barbara Jordon paid $700 to have a hand-waving snowman set up, a giant wreath hung and lights strung around palm trees at their Naples home in Long Beach.

Some inconveniences

Money isn’t the biggest issue there, however. On the day of the annual Naples Christmas Boat Parade, which was held a week ago, residents were reluctant to leave the island community after noon, said Stanley Poe of the Naples Improvement Assn. Because of the congestion, “I’m always afraid I’ll hit someone, and I can’t park,” he said. “But it’s beautiful, all those floating Christmas trees, covered in lights.”

The gondolas, 100-plus decorated boats and twinkling houses along the canals attract 40,000 spectators every year. And there are no portable restrooms. Spectators break lawn sprinklers, stand on planter boxes and leave empty beer bottles behind. Yet, “I absolutely love it,” said Jordon, who lives on one of the main canals. “It’s fun.”

Farther northeast, Tony Ward, co-chairman of Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane Assn., was ready and eager last weekend for the advance platoon of pedestrians and vehicles that descended on Christmas Tree Lane, home to 150 evergreens decorated with multicolored lights. About 150,000 cars typically wend their way past the mile-long Santa Rosa Avenue spectacle during the three-week holiday period.

Last weekend, one festive teenager, reminding everyone that this is L.A., after all, donned a tank top, red mini-skirt and red-and-black knee-high socks for her stroll up the lane, despite the chill air. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse Reserve volunteers kept order and chatted with horse lovers until 8 p.m., when pedestrians made room for Goldcoast tour buses and a steady stream of cars suddenly allowed to enter the twinkling thoroughfare.

Ward said that the traffic in these San Gabriel Valley holiday enclaves is annoying during the season, but he and his wife, Maureen, accentuate the positive. In their travels around the United States, they’ve been “surprised by the number of people who’ve visited our street at Christmas,” Ward said. “It’s helped us meet tons of people.”

A few miles east in Pasadena, onlookers on Medford Road in Upper Hastings Ranch gazed upward to watch one wacky Santa Claus frolic perilously close to the edge of his roof, amid a cloud of artificial fog. Mrs. Claus, in street clothes and also on the roof, videotaped St. Nick, who sang tunes to children dancing on the front lawn.

Each block of the suburban neighborhood competes every year, by featuring displays with a common theme. One block has lighted stars and trumpeters affixed to trees and lampposts, while another boasts bulb-decorated Christmas-tree cutouts. Lawn displays dazzle.

Bold isn’t always better

When it comes to decorating, holiday-lane veterans say that brassier isn’t always better. Barbara Admire, a Woodland Hills octogenarian and one of the progenitors of Candy Cane Lane in 1952, recalled one Christmas in the 1960s when a thief made off with the elaborate decorations adorning her neighbor’s yard. Every year thereafter, his sole nod to the season was a homemade Scrooge strategically placed on his lawn.

“The newer, younger people are more elaborate,” Admire said. “I feel the original meaning is religious. I like it simple.”

It’s all about being nice

Some neighbors who skip decorating can have a change of heart.

Marie Lewis, a single mother of two, had, for religious reasons, never put up exterior decorations. When she moved last year to a well-decorated street near Sherman Oaks’ Fashion Square, her new next-door neighbor asked if she and her kids would hang lights. Lewis, who owned no lights, at first politely declined.

The neighbor’s son, who hangs decorations for many of the street’s residents, offered to do the job for her. How could she refuse? Lewis ended up buying a string of low-key lights, to which her neighbor added another string.

“I felt a little weird, that first time, looking at my house strung with lights,” she said. “I go along with it to be a part of the neighborhood. They’re all very nice.”

Being nice is what the season is about, after all. That spirit inspired Naples resident Jordon to rescue four elderly tourists last year when they lost their bearings among the island’s winding streets. Jordon packed them into her car and delivered them safely to their waiting bus.

Derse couldn’t refuse aid to the shivering, lost teenagers who knocked on her Candy Cane Lane door a couple of years ago, separated from their driver in the parking lot that was Lubao Avenue. Derse wrapped them in blankets, gave them a phone to call their friends and watched them climb into the car and head for home.

“This is a slice of the old-fashioned American way of life,” Hawley said. “We like it.”

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Where to go for the glow

Here are some Southland neighborhoods that are decked out for the holidays:

* Candy Cane Lane in Woodland Hills: Lubao Avenue and surrounding streets, between Oxnard Street and the Ventura Freeway.

* Christmas Tree Lane in Altadena: Santa Rosa Avenue between Woodbury Road and Altadena Drive.

* Upper Hastings Ranch in Pasadena: a 44-square-block area north of Sierra Madre Boulevard and west of Michillinda Avenue.

* Bay Shore Walk in Long Beach: decorated waterfront homes and shimmering waterborne platforms, in Naples.

* For an expanded list of December holiday lights, visit Los Angeles Almanac at www.losangelesalmanac.com. (Click on “Calendar” and “December.”) For events in Orange County, check out the OC Almanac website, www.ocalmanac.com.(Click on “Annual Events in OC” and “December.”)

-- Diane Wedner