Every winter since 1989, Richard and Sue Kimball have transformed their home into a winter wonderland. Richard is responsible for the outdoors while Sue decorates inside their home. The display starts to go up in September and the couple works evenings and weekends until Thanksgiving night when all the lights go on together. The following is an edited interview.

People know us as Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. Some nights, when we know there are cars coming, we’ll be dancing in the road dressed the part and when the headlights hit us, well, that’s a surprise. My wife says, “When you can touch a man’s heart, when you can get a man to act like a child, that’s when you know you’ve done something right.”

Dark spots? There aren’t any. Counting inside and out, there’s got to be hundreds of thousands of lights. We’ve got over 8,000 just in the living room. Christmas only comes once a year, so we don’t pay attention to the electric bill.

You know how many of these things I’ve got to shovel off every time it snows? I must have at least fifty of those inflatable ones, and they won’t blow up with snow on them. Right now, I’m just trying to keep up with the person that’s going behind me and stealing all the stuff I put out.

Every year something goes missing: lights, signs, decorations. A few weeks ago, it was about 1,000 dollars worth of stuff they stole. Now I put up the electric fence and there’s a camera on the pole down there to see if I can catch anybody.

The lights first started around the door, then the windows. My wife used to put parties on for kids that needed Christmas and it got bigger and bigger. A nephew was going in the service over to Iraq in ’91 and my brother-in-law was going over there, so we thought why not give them a good Christmas before they head over?

Then when 9/11 hit we went even bigger. At first we didn’t think we should, but we said, “Well, there’s too much tragedy. We’ll do something to try to make people feel a little better and spread a little joy.” People have been moved to tears. We had a guy out in the driveway, I’m telling you, he was in his 60s, and he was screeching like a girl because he couldn’t believe it. We didn’t know where the sound was coming from.

We had a Mom and daughter dancing and hugging each other in the middle of the living room floor because they were upset with each other but when they came in here everything was OK. One time, this rig pulled up and this little boy hopped out saying, “Santa, Santa, we made it.” I said, “You did?” And he goes, “It took us forever to get to the North Pole.” He came so far on the back roads to get here that he thought he’d reached the North Pole.

All the neighbors on Jackson Road get into it now. The neighbor down the road has got more lights and the people up the road have got some. If you look around, all you see is Santa.

Last year, we had almost a thousand people come inside. We hand out magic reindeer food, snowman poop and candy canes. It’s nothing that we really publicized, but people they know to come by.