OVER the Bronx River and through the woods, a short ride up from New York City into Westchester, one can find the local branch of the North Pole at 50 Parsons Street in the village of Harrison.It is a house where Roy Aletti, 54, has lived his entire life, and where as a boy he helped his father string a modest display of Christmas lights.“He wasn’t a maniac like me,” he said. By his teenage years, Mr. Aletti had taken over the decorating and began turning the place into one of those seasonal landmarks known far and wide for its blinding display of figures on the lawn, porch and roof.Here at Roy’s Christmas Land, as the modest sign on the split-rail fence describes it, thousands of lights and hundreds of vintage decorations and lawn ornaments spill well into the yard next door.Mr. Aletti said a priest once thanked him for his policy of keeping the religious-themed displays on one side and his more folksy “fantasy land” figures on the other. Each side has its own music. It takes Mr. Aletti and his elves — employees from his paint store around the corner — two to three weeks to unpack the decorations from his five backyard storage sheds and set them up after Thanksgiving, and the same amount of time to take them down after Three Kings Day, on Jan. 6, providing a hardened snow has not frozen them in until March.

Every November, Mr. Aletti hops in his wood-paneled station wagon — decorated as a sleigh, of course — and tours nearby states and the Midwest, scouring auctions and antique shops for snowmen, carolers, reindeer, toy soldiers and the like. So all the decorations have pedigrees and back stories.exterior house paint color photosThose two 17-foot-tall toy soldiers on the lawn (no, not the twin 12-footers behind them) were brought up in a friend’s flatbed truck from West Virginia, where Mr. Aletti bought them from a pizza parlor. metal wall decor loveThe life-size soldiers from the late 1940s came from the Great Danbury State Fair, said Mr. Aletti, who then pointed to a 1930s display of a fleet of life-size reindeer pulling Santa in his sleigh.home decor coupon code

“That came from a Vermont department store — got the whole thing for 75 bucks,” he said proudly outside his house on Wednesday. “Anyone can buy a plastic Santa and put it up.”He was wearing his usual outfit of overalls and a red plaid jacket, which gives him the look of a jolly woodcutter. room decorations ideas tumblrHis girth and merry face give him an air of Old St. Nick. christmas tree with blue decorationsHe has a giddy waxed mustache and wears a Bavarian alpine hat of green velvet. cool home decor for guysDuring the Christmas season, he spends evenings and weekends around the house. When enough people amass, he pops out dressed as Santa, albeit a chain-smoking one whose red costume has a special pocket for his beloved Dewars Scotch.Mr.

Aletti realizes his habit — two and a half packs of unfiltered Camels a day, for 40 years — does not help his Santa impersonation, so his New Year’s resolution is to quit cold turkey. As it is, he smokes two or three before getting out of bed in the morning while gazing at a poster of Roy Rogers and a collection of Laurel and Hardy figurines.Mr. Aletti has numerous life-size wax figures of the duo, and of other comedians, in the house, which is a showroom for his many collecting impulses. Upstairs there are hundreds of clown statuettes and cuckoo clocks, and in the garage, dozens of miniature circus wagons are squeezed in with a real 1923 fire truck and 1934 Model-A Ford, both in working condition. He walked into a room with wax figures of Laurel and Hardy and W. C. Fields seated at a table playing cards, watched by life-size figures of the Marx Brothers and other personalities.“When I have a few drinks, I sit down and start playing with them,” Mr. Aletti said. “And when I have a few more, they start answering back.”

He went outside to the foot of the driveway to a tin display of Santa’s Post Office from the 1950s. Mr. Aletti said that about 200 letters to Santa were left here every December, and he responds to them with a form letter.He pulled out one letter, written in a mature flowing script from “Susan” that read, “I want a brand new BMW.”“You should see some of the letters I’ve gotten from women,” Mr. Aletti, a lifelong bachelor, said. “Some have been quite — let’s say, suggestive.”New York is absolutely magical at Christmas time, with trees galore, elaborate displays in department store windows, and skaters twirling atop ice rinks. Hotels partake in the whimsy, too, dazzling guests by decking out their lobbies and entrances with lights, ornaments, presents -- the works. 's top picks for New York hotel holiday decorations. Four Seasons New York The St. Regis New York The Ritz-Carlton New York Central Park The Pierre, A Taj HotelTony Pampena used to go by the nickname Clark Griswold, after the holiday-obsessed character played by Chevy Chase in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”

But that was 15 years and several thousand strands of Christmas lights ago.Now his fellow firefighters in Greenwich, Conn., just call him Tony Christmas, he said recently from his front yard in Stamford, as scores of strangers meandered through his property, sucking candy canes and gaping at an artificial forest of white Christmas trees.In the movie, the bumbling Clark faultily rigs his suburban home with 25,000 lights, to disastrous effect.This year, Mr. Pampena single-handedly affixed 58,000 colored lights to his two-story home. Barely a square foot of the house remains light-free. In 30 years of stringing lights, he has never had to call the Fire Department. “Last night over 850 people came by, and tonight I expect even more,” Mr. Pampena, wearing a Santa hat, said just after dusk on a recent Sunday. He counts neighbors among the fans of his holiday decorations. “They come over to thank me because they can read books at night by the lights on my house.” Mr. Pampena is one of the many homeowners in Connecticut and Westchester County who make an annual practice of attracting the public to their doorsteps with elaborate holiday light schemes.

As do many of those homeowners, he invites viewers to get out of their cars and explore. Mr. Pampena’s tradition was inspired by his fond childhood memories of driving around with his family to look at lights. There are several commercial Christmas light displays in the area that charge viewers a small fee. Holiday Light Fantasia, in Hartford, a two-mile trek that attracted more than 90,000 visitors last year, is a fund-raiser for the nonprofit Channel 3 Kids Camp. Fantasy of Lights, in New Haven, raises money for Easter Seals Goodwill Industries and offers 3-D glasses and a special radio broadcast to supplement the viewing experience. Westchester’s Winter Wonderland, in Valhalla, N.Y., is an out-of-car experience that has added food trucks and a forest of illuminated candy canes to its offerings this season.“My father used to say to me and my brothers, ‘If you boys are good, we’ll go out and look at the lights,’” said Andre Platt, of Ossining, N.Y. In 1990 he began ornamenting his home with Christmas lawn displays, including a life-size Santa’s workshop and a musical Ferris wheel.

Like Mr. Pampena, Mr. Platt, an elementary school physical education teacher, does not count on help from others when decorating. “My family doesn’t like going out in the cold,” he said.The last few years his preparations, which start in October, have gone more slowly than usual. “I’m 60, and four years ago I fell while setting up and broke my arm in 15 places,” he said. Still, Mr. Platt says he has never missed a year.Chuck Barringer is now in the 10th year of lighting his White Plains property. He calls his display the North Kensico Christmas Light Show. “We noticed people started coming to see the house about seven years ago,” he said. Since then, he has continued to add to his display of glowing gingerbread men and candy canes.Mr. Barringer has bolstered the underlying technology as well. For instance, in recent years Mr. Barringer has broadcast a soundtrack of Christmas carols on an FM radio frequency to visiting drivers. His lights are set up to blink to the music.

“If a song mentions the word ‘Santa,’ the Santa on my porch lights up,” he said. And some of Mr. Barringer’s neighbors have become key players, too, with impressive displays synchronized with his system.He has also switched to LEDs from incandescent lights. “Now everything is on a controller and computerized, and it’s much more efficient,” he said. And the new lights are less expensive: Mr. Barringer estimates that the cost of powering his roughly 10,000 lights from 5 to 11 p.m. is $2.25 a night. “It’s like paying for a cup of coffee,” he said. While Mr. Barringer’s display may make him a leader among tech-oriented Christmas light impresarios, Roy Aletti, of Harrison, N.Y., is more interested in leading visitors to his home on a journey back in time.“The unique thing about my Christmas display is that most of it is antiques from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s,” he said. “I’m an antique collector, so that just kind of incorporated itself into what I do.”

Mr. Aletti, the owner of Harrison Paint Supply, has been lighting his house for 40 years. After the first 15 years, he said, “it started to become a spectacle.” He now estimates that 3,000 to 5,000 people visit from Thanksgiving weekend, when he opens the display for the season, to Jan. 6, when he begins to dismantle it. On the property, which is decked with 10,000 lights, are stalls in which antique reindeer bob their heads, two 17-foot toy soldiers and other antique decorations.“We don’t have timers, nothing is digital,” Mr. Aletti said. “And the electric bill is horrible, probably $400 to $500 more than what I pay for the regular bill.” Like most homeowners, though, he does not charge a fee for gawking. “It’s worth it just to see the looks on children’s faces.”John Terwilliger is hooked on seeing the faces of visitors to the impressive light display at his Trumbull, Conn., home. Like Mr. Barringer, he also broadcasts on an FM radio frequency so viewers can tune in from their cars.

“People have knocked on the door after midnight and asked me to turn the lights on,” he said. “Sometimes when I come home and it’s starting to get dark, I see cars on the street waiting for me to go inside and turn them on.”Mary and Eugene Halliwell of Fairfield, Conn., whose holiday display includes 200 animated figures, like Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob, and some 300,000 lights, take donations for the Shriners Hospitals for Children.“We’ve been able to write the hospital a check every year,” Mrs. Halliwell said.The Halliwells’ display, which Mrs. Halliwell calls the Wonderland at Roseville, is now in its 16th year. Last year, she said, 13,000 people came to look, and by early December she had already counted 3,000 visitors. “All of us love seeing people come up and say, ‘My gosh, you’ve made my Christmas!’ ” Mrs. Halliwell said. Despite the effort of putting on a nightly show, she is never happy to be done with Christmas.“It awfully dark outside when it’s over,” she said.