Whenever Kathee McCafferty starts feeling the onset of Holiday Shopping Stress Syndrome, she bundles her husband and their daughters into the family car and heads off to look at the Christmas lights. She doesn’t take them to the elaborate commercial displays at the mall or the big resort hotels on the edge of town. Instead, like hundreds of other families, the McCaffertys explore the back streets of Traverse City in what has become a time-honored winter tradition in this Lake Michigan resort community. “It’s something I remember vividly from my own childhood,” she says. “My parents would get us into our pajamas and we’d all pile into the car to go look at the lights. I remember the snow falling, and how you could tell which streets to drive down from the glow of the lights. It was just magical.”
The same scenario plays out in small towns across the country, as harried families seek ways to reconnect with the simpler, calmer pastimes of Christmases past. In this case, though, the past is only as distant as Mom and Dad’s own childhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, when people first began stringing up holiday lights on their houses and in their yards. Today, thanks to the proliferation of ready-made lighting kits and the natural human inclination to compete with one’s neighbors, the displays are more elaborate than ever. In some communities, in fact, there are so many of these extravagant Christmas tableaux that they’ve become a seasonal tourist attraction in their own right. In Traverse City, where most winter visitors come to ski or ride snowmobiles through the neighboring forests, an increasing number of the cars cruising the light-spangled streets are from out of state. As manager of the town’s official visitor center, McCafferty now spends a good deal of time telling winter tourists how to find the biggest, brightest and best displays.
“Often the best places to go are the older neighborhoods, like Sixth Street where the big Victorian homes are, or along Monroe Street on the West Side,” she said. “The Wayne Hill neighborhood to the west and the Bunker Hill area east of town are also nice – and there’s one guy over by Woodmere Avenue who must have 20,000 lights on his little house. You can see the glow for blocks.”
One favorite stop on almost everyone’s route is the home of Sonny and Bernie Czerniak, just west of town on the Leelanau Peninsula, which has become a regular stop for midwinter bus, RV and snowmobile tours. Each year the Czerniaks (who are national polka-dancing competitors in their spare time) erect a series of elaborate Christmas tableaux that incorporate dozens of costumed mannequins, stuffed animals, elaborate props and sets, recorded music and hundreds of thousands of lights.
The Czerniaks make many of their own figures (like the furry life-size camel) from scratch. But an even more lifelike display can be found each evening along Traverse City’s West Bay waterfront, where for the past 30 years local residents and farm animals have braved the elements to pose in the Bayview Wesleyan Church’s annual live nativity display. Visiting the display is a regular part of the Christmas-decoration tradition for many families; some simply park their cars along the highway to watch for a few moments, while others crowd up to the rough fence that surrounds the set, listening to the narration and snacking on free cookies and cocoa while the participants try to pretend they’re in first-century Palestine and not at the edge of an icy Michigan lake.
If driving through the back streets of a strange town at night isn’t your particular cup of wassail, there are plenty of other small-town holiday observances on tap. With the Interlochen Center for the Arts just down the road, Traverse City has an overabundance of musical talent, and the inhabitants put on an alarming number of concerts, carol sings and other performances each Christmas season. That can range from Interlochen’s annual performance of The Nutcracker to the Traverse Symphony Orchestra’s wildly popular “Home for the Holidays” concert.
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