GALION — Linda Rinehart’s outdoor Christmas decorations light up the night sky on the east edge of town this time of year. Big time.
A seasonal showpiece. Animated. Custom built. And glowing with more than 60,000 lights and dozens of one-of-a-kind figurines. She doesn’t have an official name for the holiday attraction, but those who drive by to see it every year definitely do.
They call it “the Christmas Lights on 19.”
“Everybody enjoys it, you know. We get a lot of comments,” said Rinehart, who along with her husband, James Shank, spends countless hours setting up the massive display in front of their home at 9594 Ohio 19. “By adding something new every year is what made it grow.”
Indeed.
The couple are obsessed with Christmas, but their décor doesn’t come from catalogs or box stores. They build it from scratch using metal, conduit, chicken wire and – since Shank runs an automotive repair shop in the back – even carburetors and car parts.
“I just see stuff and then take a picture and show him and he has to engineer it and I weld it,” said Rinehart, who recently has started replacing many of their 200-count light strands with LED’s. “Some of it is trial and error. You make it, and if it doesn’t work, you redo it.”
An eight-foot-tall jack-in-the-box was rigged from a stationary exercise bike which they flipped upside down and put inside a handmade plywood box. The bike’s mechanism propels the clownlike figure up and down every time the red lid pops open.
A Ferris wheel, complete with seats that swivel, is run by an electric gear-reduction motor. An alternator generates current for the lights, and the passengers are actually dolls made and outfitted by Rinehart’s 95-year-old mother, Helen Rinehart.
Although she started decorating the house back in the late 1970s, it wasn’t until 1983 that she and Shank attempted creating their first animated display – a train with an engine and coal car. It was constructed from used car parts, conduit pipe and molded plastic.
Since then, they have added, among other things, a three-dimensional poinsettia, sleigh and reindeer, merry-go-round, rocking horse, cowboy, teeter-totter with Santa and Mrs. Claus and even a youngster making a snow angel, all next to a driveway lined with white arches.
“I like them all, really,” Rinehart said of their Christmas creations. “I like them even better when they’re working alright. He told me I couldn’t have any more moving ones though and I said, ‘But I have ideas. Don’t you want to hear any of my ideas?’”
One of her ideas was a 40-foot long ski slope, complete with skiers and sledders. It was constructed from a grain elevator, but the mechanism was cleverly switched so the figures with their conduit ski poles would be heading downhill instead.
And the multi-colored moving bear? He’s made of conduit and chicken wire, with his entire body mounted on top of an old ringer washing machine. The blue-eyed bear rotates thanks to the agitator motion of the machine, Rinehart said.
The couple store the massive pieces in two double-car garages out back. The lights are usually tested in October, then assembly kicks off the first weekend of November when Rinehart’s brother and two sisters traditionally come into town to help.
It takes full two weekends just for the set-up and another week to hook up the maze of plugs and electrical cords, she said. The attraction, which usually slows car and truck traffic along the busy highway, is lit from dusk to midnight through Jan. 2.
In this season of giving, the two are happy their yuletide tradition inspires so many. Passersby who toot their horns. Strangers who leave notes and gift certificates in the mailbox. And, in the case of one elderly man, the satisfaction knowing that his final wish was simple – drive by “the Christmas Lights on 19.”
