The Christmas light fights, New Orleans edition

2008 update: If you found this page while searching for photos of Al Copeland's Christmas light display, check out this photo essay.

I love holiday lights on houses and buildings. It gets dark so early at this time of year, and it's delightful to see houses with strings of lights on them, on the trees, anywhere possible. I'm not so fond of the giant inflatable decorations, but I like just about everything else. There's a house a block or so away from us that we call "the Vegas house," because they used to fling lights willy-nilly into the trees and on the shrubbery, both at Halloween and Christmas. In recent years, their light display has become sadly tidier, although they still manage some bizarre decorations that I like.

But when you talk to me about big, memorable Christmas light displays, what leaps to mind is Al Copeland. If you're from the New Orleans area, you understand me. But for the rest of you, I'll give you a taste of the great saga of Al Copeland's light display.

I don't know when Copeland started putting together his elaborate display of Christmas lights, giant figurines and decorations -- I only remember being driven to the display for the first time in the late 1970s. Copeland, who is the founder of the Popeye's Chicken chain, had a huge house on the lakefront in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. And every year, his Christmas light display got huger and more popular. We would drive out to the lakefront once or twice every year around Christmas, usually getting stuck in huge lines of cars filled with other people all out to do the same thing. Some people parked and walked around. Copeland's light display wasn't the only one in the neighborhood -- I remember a nearby house that had a then-amazing picture window where you could see Santa and his elves at work (the figures actually moved). But Copeland's house is the one everyone went primarily to see. Our family usually made the visit, despite my dad's claim that he hated the traffic and inconvenience, and often I'd go with a Girl Scout troop or youth group or whatever organization I was in that year.

Eventually, Copeland's neighbors protested -- I was a teenager at the time. They filed a lawsuit demanding the lights be removed. The traffic problems were immense for them, as you can understand. If an emergency occurred, there would be no way to get an ambulance in there in time. And they were having to deal with crowds of people invading the neighborhood every night, leaving trash (including dirty diapers) on their lawns, asking to use the bathroom, and so forth. If it were my neighborhood, I wouldn't have liked it either, but I didn't see it that way at the time.

It was the first time in my life I ever heard anti-Semitic comments, because relatives and older family friends all tsk-tsked the neighbors and claimed the suit was filed by rich Jewish people who didn't celebrate the holiday anyway. The neighbors were certainly considered the Grinches who stole Christmas in this scenario. A 1983 New York Times article available online tells me the lawsuit was thrown out that year and Copeland characteristically responded by saying that he intended to add even more stuff to his display. But eventually the neighbors won, and Copeland's house went dark until the 1990s, when he was allowed a limited, smaller-scale display (which probably grew over the years, back to excess). I don't remember what happened to the decorations in those interim years, except for one.

In 1990, Copeland moved his Christmas light orgy to the State Capitol in Baton Rouge. I was working in the Capitol at the time and was extremely annoyed, since it made getting home from work very difficult some days. Also, Copeland had put the light display there along with a huge lighted "Support Our Troops" decoration because he wanted to support the troops then fighting in the Middle East, but I felt like it was totally not supporting the troops to waste that much electricity when we seemed to be fighting because of oil. Shouldn't we be trying to use less, not more? I wondered.

I am told that these days, the lights are still on display at Copeland's old lakefront house -- in fact, he has too many decorations to fit, and is thinking of moving it all to Lafreniere Park. But for now, people still spend hours waiting in lines to see it, and that the neighbors still don't like the damn thing. Many New Orleanians also go to the big Celebration in the Oaks light display -- the name change some years ago from Christmas in the Oaks inspiring another round of unnecessarily vitriolic commentary about how the inclusion of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa decorations "ruined everything." (My dad actually refused to go for awhile.)

As for me, I don't go to big light displays anymore. Austin has a big display at Zilker, and I've often driven by at night in December and seen the big tree, which looks fabulous even from afar. There's also the less organized and more laid-back displays on 37th Street, which I found accidentally once about 10 years ago, but haven't seen since. I'm probably turning into my dad, because I can't bear the idea of being stuck in the car for a long time in traffic just to see a bunch of lights. (Although I wouldn't mind seeing the old giant Mr. Bingle at Celebration in the Oaks, someday.)

I'm happy enough to drive around the neighborhood and see the lights everyone is putting up for the holiday season. Especially the Vegas house. C'mon guys, fling a string of colored lights in the tree branches for me.

Posted at December 5, 2007 12:58 PM