Excerpts from “Spirit of the Lights”

Excerpted from Spirit of the Lights, the inspirational collection of stories of those people who have come to see Marcia Hales’ Park Point lighting display and experienced healing, grace and community in the walk-through winter wonderland.

In the Light

Across Minnesota Avenue and on the other side of the harbor, the sun was still high above the Blatnik Bridge. The sky remained a pale blue. Marcia had at least an hour or hour and a half before full-on darkness and before the first of her final visitors of the season would arrive. Christmas had been celebrated more than two weeks earlier, but the Serbian Christmas was only a few days past. The Serbian Orthodox Church uses the Julian calendar and this was the first weekend after the Serbians’ January 7 Christmas Day. And the weekend every year Marcia calls it quits for another season of lighting.

Her boots made a “p’foomp” sound as she broke through crusty, weeks-old snow on her way to the penguins and igloo. “P’foomp, p’foomp, p’foomp.” One of the critters had tumbled in the wind and needed to be put upright. “There we go,” Marcia said, wiggling his feet into the snow until they found solid support. She repacked snow around. She checked the wishing penguin. He stood tall, proud and ready to be patted, ready to continue the magic.

The temperature had been dropping all afternoon and stood in the single digits. Marcia wondered how many would arrive for the final night. Puffs of warmth gathered momentarily around her face before being swept away angrily by gusts off the icy lake. The smoke from chimneys all over town bent sideways, leaning to the south, conceding defeat to the nasty northern winds.

The campfire had to be started. On her way to the pit, she paused, momentarily, as she passed by the memorial to Alan.

“The way I deal with loss is to throw myself into a project,” she once told a television reporter. “Getting into the lights just gave me a new sense of hope and focus.

“I’m always amazed at people that come from other parts of the country who go, ’Holy cow, I can’t believe somebody would open their house,’ and, ’It was a leap of faith.’ But I guess it was, really.”

A leap she never regrets. A leap that changed her life, gave it a new focus and purpose and opened her up to new people and unexpected rewards; those personal awards are always more satisfying than any award that’s won.

At the fire pit, Marcia paused again, her eyes searching the treetops for a shooting star she made with pure-white rope lights. The star, with lingering trail, is a tribute to Ellie – and is about the size Ellie was when she died. A deserved memorial. An undeserved loss. On the ground in front the stand of pines that hold up the shooting star, Marcia positioned a simple sign: “Shining so bright and gone too soon,” it reads in red, all-capital letters. Marcia couldn’t help but read the words for the thousandth time, remembering Ellie and remembering a comet she once saw streaking over Lake Superior before burning out prematurely.

“Ellie sort of was like a shooting star,” Marcia once reflected. “She was very bright and vibrant and hopeful and then, before we knew it, she just wasn’t here anymore.”

Turning her attention back to the fire pit, Marcia patted together a bed of twigs, small branches and newspaper pages. She set in a few larger logs and then stood three planks up on end, leaning them against each other. She pulled a match from her coat pocket and struck it.

The glow from the fire, faint in the evening’s earliest hints of darkness, illuminated nearby decorations. The ones closest to the ground would be removed and stored away by spring. If they weren’t, squirrels and chipmunks, invited to Marcia’s yard with handfuls of peanuts, would gnaw at the wires, ruining them.

Marcia replaces all of the lights every two years. All 120,000-plus of them. They burn out. Entire lines stop working. Her green bulbs fade until they’re clear, eliminating her accent color.

“It’s a lot of maintenance,” she acknowledged. “It’s kind of like a job.” A job she loves, even if it means having to be home and to stay home after about 3:30 p.m. every day – every single day – from the Friday after Thanksgiving, all through December and well into January, year after year. And even if it means sometimes spending Christmas alone while her own family gathers at her mother’s house.

In the fall, when she brings back out the ground displays and finishes replacing what needs to be replaced, is when Marcia adds lights and new decorations and more of her unique creations. “Even this year,” she said two Christmas seasons after receiving the city’s Gold Standard Award, “I designed two new fairies and did a lot more out on the dunes. There are thousands of new lights out there.”

The fire roaring, Marcia hurried down several steps she built one summer by half burying native bluestones. She made her way toward the garden house. Her coat hung open in spite of the frigid cold. Her stocking cap had gotten into her eyes and had been taken off and forgotten somewhere. Other things demanded attention. The shadows were getting longer. Time was running short.

Inside the garden house, about the size of a photo studio, Marcia stepped past her bronze trophies and the row of wooden Santas her mother had carved by hand decades earlier. News clippings, collected and framed over the years, hung from the walls. Marcia made sure the cider was still hot and simmering, that the ladle was at the ready, that her latest guest book was opened to a fresh page, that the donation can for Shirley’s Fund was at its most eye-catching position, and that the lights that ran around the room, up near the ceiling, were turned on and working. Check, check, check, check and check.

She crossed to the house and headed into the basement. In an instant – and without the dramatic, sparks-flying boom that switches always make when flipped in movies – Marcia’s yard simply and silently just filled with light. Glorious light. Breathtaking light. A brilliant warmth of holiday magic and cheer.

“It’s the spirit of the season,” Marcia said, taking it in, a look of utter satisfaction washing over her. “It’s hard to say the lights are about loss. But they do give comfort to people who have lost. It was my way of grieving that first year after I lost Alan, to keep my attention on a goal and to keep busy.

“God willing my health will hold and I can continue doing it. I’m fine. I don’t need a lot of help. And I realize a lot of people make this a tradition. It is expected. They look forward to it and I love doing it. So I’ll keep doing it.

“I call it my winter gardening. People say it’s magical. It does have that kind of ambiance, with the fairies and angels and everything.”

* * *

“One reason I call it ’holiday spirit in the lights,’” Marcia explained, “is because there seems to be some sort of spirit that people get when they step into those lights. I can’t really even describe it … it’s peaceful. There’s just the Mannheim Steamroller music, but it’s not loud and blaring. It’s the ambiance of being by the lake and with the trees. It’s sort of a spirit of community, too – where you have big people and little people. I can remember nights where people have reunited who haven’t seen each other for years. People come from CHUM (the Churches United in Ministry shelter). They really don’t have a place to have Christmas. They’re homeless. There’s just a broad variety of people who come. I’ve never heard an angry word.”

* * *

Drawn, the visitors arrived. One last time. One last night.

A pair of women first. A mother and daughter? Sisters? There was really no way to tell. Their coats were zipped over their chins; their hats and hoods were pulled low over their eyes. They walked through slowly, made their way to the beach, returned, and warmed up at the fire pit before finding Marcia. She was tinkering with an uncooperative decoration, not far from the angel memorial to Jim Marshall.

“Thank you for putting on the lights,” one of the women called.

“Oh, you’re welcome.”

“What a beautiful view from the beach,” said the other woman, clumsily adjusting her stocking cap with hands that were covered by oversized choppers. “There are all your lights and then the city lights down the beach. I saw those and said, ’Wow, Marcia really did a good job!’”

“I do try,” Marcia responded, laughing.

“Yeah, you did it up,” the first woman jumped back in. “Thank you for having it. This is the best.”

A man approached next. He wore no hat and only a thin fleece jacket. He couldn’t have been from Duluth, or even Minnesota. Locals know better than to venture out like that.

“Thank you so much,” he said, explaining he was from Memphis, Tennessee, and had just been driving by. “I saw how beautiful this was and I just had to stop.”

“I’m glad you did,” Marcia said. “What are you doing up here?”

“Business,” he said. “You know, I just love your lights. I hope people let you know how much they appreciate it.”

“Oh, they do,” said Marcia.

Another woman, as well bundled as the first two, joined the conversation. “I love that almost all the lights are white,” she said. “It just gives a serenity to the whole scene.”

The woman’s eyes followed the lights toward the heavens, which were starting to fill with stars. “How do you get the lights way up high in the trees?” she asked.

“I climb the trees,” Marcia answered to the delight and the chuckles of her visitors. “I do. OK, I also have a big ladder my husband bought me one year and I have these long poles that I use.”

“Oh my goodness,” one of them marveled.

“Good for you.”

“It’s actually kind of nice in October when we have a nice day,” Marcia insisted.

“Will you keep on doing this?”

“Oh, yeah, you bet,” she said, her accent and generosity still classic northern Minnesotan.

“This is just lovely,” the praise continued.

“Thank you,” Marcia replied again and again. “Thank you.”

Beyond Christmas

The Christmas lights weren’t even on – not in the middle of summer. Still, as the sun started to set on a windy, cool evening, a true Park Point evening, Marcia’s ears perked up at the familiar cruuuuunching sound of gravel under tires outside. Her eyes found the window and she realized a car – no, make that two cars – were approaching.

“I’m sitting here in my house,” she recalled, a hint of a grin forming at the corner of her mouth, “and I see these people pull up, and they get their picnic basket out and they walk through the arches.”

The arches that lead into her lighting display stay up year-round now. Dismantling and packing away the largest of the decorations wouldn’t be practical. And really, where would she store it all?

Marcia hurried outside. “Hello,” she called after the group.

“Hello. We hope you don’t mind if we have a picnic in your park here,” one of them responded, as friendly and as innocently as a dinner guest requesting just a bit more wine.

Park? Marcia thought. Picnic? “Umm …”

Finally, with classic Marcia graciousness – and frankness – she answered: “I guess it doesn’t matter; feel free.”

And they did feel free. They stayed hours, eating their macaroni and other treats. When they decided to light a fire in the fire pit, Marcia hurried out with the hose. “In case the fire gets away from you,” she said as the wind continued whipping in off Lake Superior.

She went back inside but couldn’t help keeping tabs on her “guests.” Finally, she approached them. What’s their deal, she wondered? She found an extremely friendly, enthusiastic bunch who didn’t find anything strange at all about their choice of picnic locations. They invited Marcia to sit beside her own fire.

“Then we started to talk and they stayed for about another hour,” Marcia recalled.

The evening finally ended and the two carloads of visitors headed out, the sound of crunching gravel chasing them down the driveway and out to the road.

Three weeks later the same two cars returned.

Marcia and her grandson Zach were in the yard. A beautiful, bright Saturday afternoon, the sort Duluthians really learn to appreciate while enduring so much snow and bitter cold. They were stacking wood near the fire pit. Never too early in Duluth to get ready for winter.

“Need help?” Without waiting for a reply the visitors helped move the wood pile. They stayed and visited again and Marcia found herself laughing and joking, as if with lifelong friends.

“They’ll stop kind of at random now,” she said. “I never know when.”

“We try to stop by as often as we can; we just do it spur of the moment,” said Julie Haberle, who leads the treks to Marcia’s from her family’s home in the Twin Cities suburb of Minnetonka, Minnesota, about 21/2 hours south of Duluth, or from her family’s cabin on Chub Lake, not far from Cloquet, 30 miles west. She runs a ministry centered on the debate over creation and evolution. Her husband, Paul, is a contractor.

“Heck, we’d hang out (at Marcia’s) all the time if we could,” she said. “She’s just so darn interesting. For some reason we really hit it off. We can not see each other for a year and then go there and it’s just delightful. We’ve brought tons of friends there. We just love her to death. She’s just like family.”

That’s how it has become with lots of folks. No matter what time of year it is, Christmastime visitors return to Marcia’s, to her yard and to the hospitality of a friend who always has coffee on, even if it’s for acquaintances she has scarcely met. They pop in, often just to say hi.

“I like that, actually. I enjoy that. I’m never alone then,” Marcia confided. “It doesn’t bother me. I just sort of take it for granted, this place. Once they meet me it’s like they’re my best friends forever. That’s nice, really.”

The regulars include Donna Kennedy, when the pain allows, who showed up on that wintery night coming home from seeing the hand surgeon in the Twin Cities. She always has her camera. In the summer, she sometimes comes on her motorcycle. Like so many others, Marcia said, “I never know when she’s going to stop.”

No matter who’s there, the conversation, inevitably, turns to the lights, the common denominator, the flame amidst the moths. “I hope you’re doing the lights again,” Marcia hears time and again, all year long.

“I don’t think it would work real good to just say, ’No, I can’t do the lights.’ It’s become a tradition,” she said. “When you look in the guest books, you see the families that come year after year.”

While others might tire of the upkeep and the costs related to keeping the tens of thousands of lights lit, and while some might be turned off by strangers who drop in unannounced – even in the middle of summer for a picnic – that just isn’t Marcia. Or the spirit of her lights, which, apparently don’t even need to be turned on for others to be drawn by their glow.

Unplugged

Rudy was an exchange student from Germany, attending college in Duluth. He was nearly as tall as Alan. If they were on a basketball team, he’d play forward and Alan center. His nest of sand-colored hair tended to curl into a snarl at the top. When he was being serious, he reminded Marcia of a younger version of the actor Russell Crowe.

Marcia and Alan had met Rudy at Sky Harbor Airport, a single-runway and float-plane facility at the end of Park Point. Alan flew in and out from there. Marcia occasionally helped run the place. Rudy and Alan came to enjoy drinking beer together, staying up late at night and singing “America the Beautiful” and other patriotic songs. Men can be odd that way, Marcia always thought.

Rudy was among the throngs who visited the lights that first year. He entered the house, poured himself a cup of coffee, frowned when he realized it was cold, popped open the microwave, put the cup inside and started pressing buttons. Beep, beep-beep, beep, and then he hit the green “START” button. But instead of the hum of a microwave, he was met with darkness. Total and complete darkness. With all the decorations and lights outside, running an appliance inside like a microwave was just too much for Marcia’s and Alan’s electrical system.

“You can’t just do that,” Marcia chided, grabbing a flashlight and heading toward the fuse box in the basement. “You just can’t.”

Rudy’s words followed her down the stairs and gave her pause: “America, what a strange place. You invite all these people to see your yard and you can’t cook for a month – or even heat up a lousy cup of coffee.”

Strange, yes. And inconvenient, too. Marcia grinned. She wouldn’t have it any other way, she decided then.

My Story

Everyone in the family seems to recall it differently, that year we discovered the wishing penguin. We all made wishes – but there is only one that we all still remember.

We had been coming, together, to Marcia Hales’ lights ever since I was assigned to write a story about them and about Marcia for the News Tribune. The story was fun, and I quickly created a mini-beat for myself that allowed me to tell tales each December of lighting and of area decorators and even of decorating trends. I also took over compiling the newspaper’s annual list of brightest and best houses, knowing the list of addresses, a longtime tradition for Duluth, found its way onto the front seats of limos, senior center buses and countless family vehicles. I reveled in helping people have a brighter and merrier Christmas.

The wishing penguin, my family and I learned years later, was the invention of a 4-year-old girl who wrapped her arms around one of the many plastic penguins in Marcia’s yard. Why she picked the one she picked no one knows. Her Grandma, a friend of Marcia’s, made sure the little girl’s wishes – usually for whatever was the gotta-have-it toy that year – came true. “Maybe,” Grandma joked in the News Tribune, “the penguin has the powers of opening the pocketbook.”

The penguin came to belong to everyone the year Marcia placed the sign in front of it, promising wishes whispered to the penguin would be granted.

My own 4-year-old, Charleigh, believed it the year we first noticed the penguin. She crouched down. She rubbed the critter’s head with determination. She patted it hard. Then she rubbed it again just to be sure.

On the way home she announced, “I’m going to get a new baby sister. I wished on the penguin and I’m going to have a new baby sister.”

“Oh, brother,” her big sister, Claire, sighed.

Julie and I just looked at each other. We had long dreamed of being blessed with a third baby. But it had been years since our last child and we were now pushing our 40s. Our time had passed, we figured.

“Maybe Santa will bring you a doll,” we offered.

Charleigh wouldn’t hear it.

She knew what she asked for and she trusted what she was told, that the penguin granted wishes.

And doggone if it didn’t. Two months later, while treating ourselves to leftover cake from Charleigh’s fifth birthday, Julie and I were privileged to break the thrilling news: We were indeed going to have another baby.

“And it’s going to be a girl,” Charleigh shrieked.

Doggone if it wasn’t. Regine was born that fall.

Before long, she, too, was told all about the wishing penguin and was begging to go see it, to go whisper into its ear.

When she was 3, she didn’t even care that it wasn’t Christmas anymore or that spring was fast approaching.

I was working on this book at the time; maybe I was talking about the penguin; maybe that was why she suddenly needed so badly to go visit.

“The lights won’t be on,” I told her.

She wasn’t fazed. Off we went.

I knocked on Marcia’s door. A regular visitor those days because of book work, I explained we were just running up into the yard for a second.

We had a flashlight. We would be fine. We’d be quick. We did not, I teased, have a picnic basket with us.

Reggie got to the penguin first. But before she could pat it or rub its head or whisper in its ear, the yard around us erupted in a warm and dazzling glow.

Marcia had run down to the basement to make sure our visit, even if it was just a quick one, was memorable and special.

So like her.

“Go ahead,” I said to Reggie, who was wide-eyed with wonder at the lights everywhere. “Make your wish.”

Finally, she did.

She patted the penguin on the head. Three quick raps with the palm of her open hand. Then she straightened up, took a step back and put both hands on her hips.

“Well,” she said, “where is it?”

“It’s not like a vending machine,” I told her, smiling. I scooped her up into my arms, looking into her chocolate-brown eyes, just like mine.

“Wishes do come true, though,” I said, giving her a squeeze I knew she wouldn’t understand. It made her giggle.

“They really, really do,” I said. “As long as you believe.”

– Chuck Frederick, December 23, 2010

The author wishes to thank Konnie, Cindy, Paul, Siiri and

everyone at Lake Superior Magazine for their belief in this project;

Julie for her untiring support and her valuable input and feedback;

and Claire, Charleigh and Reggie for their

encouragement and bottomless well of love.

The author also wishes to thank Marcia. Of course.

An Angel

The story went something like this whenever Alan Nylen told it (and he liked to tell it often).

A few weeks before Christmas 1998, he bought a 24-foot ladder. That was the year he and his wife, Marcia Hales, decided to turn their yard full of holiday decorations into something spectacular enough to enter in their hometown Duluth’s citywide lighting contest. He was up on that ladder, stretching and straining to place – just so – string after string of twinkling beauty and holiday cheer into the highest branches of the tallest pines.

But then his foot slipped. He grabbed crazily at the pine needles in front of him and then for a metal rung, any metal rung, but to no avail. Down he went, crashing into the frozen yard below.

His eyes pinched tight in agony, a moan escaped from his pursed lips. Flat on his back, he gasped for breath and considered the seriousness of his injuries.

After a few moments, his eyes slit open, life returned to the crumbled heap that was his tall, lanky body. That’s when he saw her. In the branches and in the lights above, there was an angel. An all-white angel formed by the lights. “Alan’s Angel,” as he and Marcia would come to call her.

* * *

Here’s how the story really went, according to Marcia.

A few weeks before Christmas 1998, Marcia, a longtime lighting lover and yuletide enthusiast, decided to turn her yard full of holiday decorations into something spectacular enough to enter in Duluth’s citywide lighting contest. Her husband, Alan, begrudgingly bought a 24-foot ladder for the endeavor and even more begrudgingly climbed to its top to toss clumps of lights into the highest branches of the tallest pines. After climbing back down, he gave the tree as mighty a shake as he could until some of the strings of lights filtered down and tumbled into the lower branches.

Done, he grunted. And was glad for it.

A few days later there was a knock on the door. A young couple stood in the cold of the evening darkness. The young woman shivered, her hood up, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She hopped from foot to foot. The young man didn’t even have on a jacket. The tattoos on his arms dotted with goose bumps, but he didn’t seem to care.

“Dude,” the young man said as Alan leaned his head no further out of the warm house than was absolutely necessary to consider his guests. The young man pointed toward the highest branches of the tallest pine. “Is that an angel?”

Alan looked. Marcia joined him. And for the first time they saw it. An angel. Formed by the many lines of lights. “Alan’s Angel,” as Alan and Marcia would come to call her.

* * *

No matter how it happened, there was little doubt: An angel appeared at the massive, well-known backyard, walk-through holiday lighting display of Marcia Hales and Alan Nylen. An angel.

Follow the Cats

The crusty, frozen, trampled snow scrunched under Marcia’s boots. She carried a bucket of sand and a small shovel. A scoop at a time, she sprinkled the paths beneath her lights to give visitors traction. The sky was a deepening purple. The bright blues and faint pinks of an hour earlier were now hugging only the horizon.

The first cars were arriving.

“Hello. Welcome,” Marcia called to her first visitors of the evening. Three slow-moving, elderly women, each wearing a stocking cap, mittens and an overstuffed coat that hung down near their knees, climbed out of their car. Puffs of fur stuck up from the tops of their boots. They were ready for the elements.

“Shirley will show you around,” Marcia joked, gesturing toward her bearded collie. Shirley wore little red booties on her feet and a red sweater pulled over her head and around her midsection to protect her, too, from the frigid Duluth winter. She loved the many visitors, and the visitors loved to pet and nuzzle her.

“Or you can follow the cats,” Marcia continued, grinning, noticing that Mom and Howard also had come outside. It was the same tongue-in-cheek advice she offered to so many lights lovers, especially the first-timers.

“What?” The ladies were skeptical and grew more skeptical when Shirley darted off in one direction and Mom and Howard started up the path into the yard in a completely different direction. Follow them?

Others came and Marcia soon forgot all about the three women. Eventually, Marcia made her way to the fire pit, which by then needed a fresh log. About to toss on another piece of pine, she suddenly paused. She heard, coming from the neighboring property, a rustling and a crunching of fallen tree branches. It would have sounded like a deer coming through the woods if not for the irritated voices. Marcia couldn’t quite make out what the voices were saying.

Then she saw them. The three women. Approaching from the dunes and the beach beyond. They were stomping through a portion of the neighbor’s yard purposely left natural and with undergrowth to hold back sandstorms. Mom and Howard broke into the yard first. Were the women dutifully following Marcia’s four-legged feline family?

“I didn’t mean …” Marcia started when the women also re-entered her decorated yard. Then she turned to hide her laughter. “Oh, my,” she said just to herself, laughing some more.

The women looked bewildered and stone-faced. Their stocking caps were askew. Their mittens and the fur poking from the tops of their boots were covered with burs.

Marcia turned back to them. “Sometimes the cats don’t stay on the paths,” she apologized. She invited the women into her home to warm up.