The first to deck the halls

If you’ve ever wondered whose idea it was to decorate entire houses like Christmas trees, this little inspirational book will explain it all. The lights, the action figures, the yards full of twinkly Yuletide scenes, the rooftops adorned with Santas, reindeer and sleighs, the carols wafting through night air. Somebody had to be first with the idea. And Georja Skinner says it was her dad, George.

He was a handsome, athletic, can-do kind of guy who was living with his father in a small Boyle Heights bungalow when he was paralyzed by polio at age 22.

For the next two years he was confined to an iron lung (which allowed him to breathe) at L.A.’s County General hospital. Neighbors and church friends helped the father and son keep their spirits up with food, gifts and cards. Skinner vowed to his dad that he’d get better and get out. And he did.

That was in 1936, and the Depression was in full swing. Boyle Heights suddenly looked shabby; friends and neighbors had lost jobs and lacked money to fix homes and cars. Young George wanted to do something to lift their spirits the same way they’d lifted his. And a Christmas fantasy he’d nurtured in the hospital became ever more real.

He enlisted his carpenter father to help decorate their house in a way that Georja Skinner says had never been done before. Lights, carved figures, fake snow, huge decorated trees. He even rigged a record player to magnify sound so that carols could cheer the neighborhood.

The father and son did it all themselves, working for weeks and spending every cent they had -- all in anticipation of the joy their house would bring.

The first year, their work was a huge success, the second even bigger. Thousands traveled to see the spectacular Christmas house, which hit the front page of the Los Angeles Times and every other local paper -- and then made news across the country.

There’s a touching back story to this tale, about family and forgiveness. It is not a literary work, not even poetically told. But it is a daughter’s sincere effort to tell the story of her father’s Christmas legacy, and in that she succeeds quite well.

-- Bettijane Levine