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Chuck Frederick3 of 7
Dennis O'Hara
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The setting by Lake Superior, seen in the distance, enhances the serenity.
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Dennis O'Hara
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Many a wish has been made on the “wishing penguin” near its family around the “Believe” sign.
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Marcia Hales’ late husband, Alan Nylen, accidentally created the display’s first angel.
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Dennis O'Hara
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Another angel is part of the nativity that graces Marcia’s yard.
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Dennis O'Hara
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Marcia Hales sits beside more than a decade of guest books from her walk-through holiday display. Marcia welcomes visitors, Thanksgiving through the New Year, at 3739 Lake Avenue South.
The brilliant lights that Marcia Hales puts out every Christmas didn’t call to me like they do so many others. An editor did.
A junior reporter on the Duluth News Tribune, I was assigned one holiday season to cover the city’s annual lighting contest. It was a dog of an assignment, but one I came to quite enjoy. It meant compiling the annual list of brightest and best houses, a decades-old tradition in the city. I realized those addresses found their way onto the front seats of limos, senior-center buses and countless family vehicles. I reveled in helping people have a brighter, merrier holiday.
That gave me a glimpse of the satisfaction Marcia must feel from inviting the community to walk through her displays, to sip cider while warming up and to enjoy the glow of another season, of a new friend.
Marcia’s story is incredible; so are the tales told by the many who make her and her yard an every-December tradition – so incredible, they could fill a book. And have. Spirit of the Lights was recently released by this magazine’s publisher. I hope you enjoy these excerpts from my book.
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Up near Hoyt Lakes, amid the mines that produced the ore that created the steel that built the tanks, guns and heavy machinery that won World Wars I and II, a trickle starts deep in the woods: the St. Louis River.
It meanders through Northeastern Minnesota, spilling against weedy banks, frothing around submerged boulders and roaring over drop-offs large and small. The river alternately races and limps toward Duluth-Superior Harbor, the busiest on the Great Lakes, and into Lake Superior, the largest in the world.
All along its journey, the St. Louis River carries silt and sand, the same material that, over hundreds of thousands of years, and perhaps even longer, created the Duluth sandbar known as Minnesota Point. A seven-mile-long freshwater sandbar, it’s the longest on Earth and home to an odd little neighborhood – Park Point.
Just wide enough along most of its length for a two-lane road, two lanes of bike traffic and homes crowded on both sides, Park Point was once a summertime getaway and a place where hay fever sufferers escaped for relief before antihistamines.
Because “the Point” is separated from Duluth’s mainland by a shipping canal, there’s only one way on and off the finger-looking neighborhood – across the Aerial Lift Bridge, not far from Duluth’s downtown. The bridge spans the canal between Duluth-Superior Harbor and Lake Superior, and if a big boat is coming, motorists get “bridged,” meaning forced to wait, as the bridge’s road deck lifts straight up to allow vessels underneath and then lowers so traffic can resume.
Despite the inconvenience, and despite the chilly winds that always seem to be howling in from Lake Superior, the Point has slowly been discovered by the wealthy and elite. Their mansions snuggle into the dunes right alongside the old cottages and the simpler houses of yesteryear, creating an intriguing mix of old and new, past and future, wealthy and not-so-wealthy. Park Point is a neighborhood of contrasts, a neighborhood in transition.
And home to Marcia Hales. Hers isn’t one of Park Point’s mansions. She lives in a modest yet spacious story-and-a-half beach house, its countertops a whitewashed shade of the towering evergreens outside, its tongue-and-groove walls and ceilings the color of the beach sands after they’ve been drenched by a Lake Superior wave. From October to January her house fills with the fragrance of simmering apple cider, its fresh sweetness for evenings of visitors to her glowing yard outside. Mammoth vats hum on the stove in the snack-bar island that marries Marcia’s kitchen to her warm and welcoming sitting area.
Wide, sliding glass doors, as large as one wall, expose the sitting area to the yard, which isn’t much larger than a convenience store parking lot or a Little League baseball infield. In that yard, Marcia has created a spectacle: Her breathtaking holiday lighting display remains tasteful and true despite its growth now to more than 120,000 lights. Visitors are beckoned to not only look at the wildly popular lights but to wander among them, to be a part of them, to allow them to become part of their Christmas traditions. A glowing tunnel begins at the edge of the street, guiding a path past the penguins with tangles of green ribbon decorating each critter’s neck, a lighted igloo and a “Believe” sign in their midst. The path pauses at a wishing penguin before opening to a towering castle outlined by plastic-encased “rope” lights. A 20-foot, star-topped tower of lights – looking like something out of “Cinderella” – reaches toward the inky darkness of the night sky to the left. Beyond the tower, the well-decorated path continues toward the frozen sands of Lake Superior. Waves crash and recede, “poosh-sss, poosh-sss,” giant ice boulders bob and maneuver, “buh-woosh, buh-woosh,” creating a soundtrack of serenity. A campfire crackles at the heart of the display. Long sticks for marshmallows lean against the plastic lounge chairs, waiting. On the opposite edge of the display, lighted bears skate across a frozen pond, the lighted outline of an angel graces towering archways and Marcia’s heated garden house-turned-cider house offers a respite and warmth. Fairies fill the trees, joined by Old Man Winter. The lights are white with accents of green.
The entire display looks like something created to win a contest. And it was. At first. But the creation only started out that way.
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“My mother was the decorator when I was growing up,” Marcia says, slipping her petite, slightly hunched-at-the-shoulders, 65-year-old frame onto a stool at her snack bar. She sipped at a mug of vanilla-flavored coffee, her voice dripping with a thick northern Minnesota accent, a slow, deliberate way of talking in which “yes” becomes “yaah” and in which many sentences start with “well.” Her sandy-silver hairdo may be more silver than sandy these days, and the years may have given her a few new smile wrinkles, but Marcia’s bright brown eyes are as warm and commanding as ever. They request full attention.
“When I was a kid, Christmas lights were a big deal,” she says. “Back then all they had were those big lights so decorating was really something to do. It was really a project and an achievement.”
“Back then” was the 1950s when the working-class West Duluth neighborhood of Marcia’s childhood was home to the People’s Brewing Company, Diamond Calk Horseshoe Company, Carsten Coal, an Oliver Mining research lab and other smoke-spewing, blue-collar industries that nowadays would be referred to as economic engines. Her neighborhood was home, too, to bakeries, barbers and afternoons of ice skating at Merritt and Memorial parks. Short walks took Marcia to school at Merritt Elementary, since converted into apartments, to West Junior High School, torn down in favor of a new Laura MacArthur Elementary School, and to Denfeld High School, its clock tower an icon to this day of a hard-working, close-knit community … where neighbors watched out for neighbors and where kids had a hard time getting away with anything because everyone knew who they were – and who their parents were.
“I really felt I arrived the year Mom made plywood cutouts of three little girls as part of the Christmas decorations,” Marcia recalls. “She hand-painted them and was quite proud of them. They all wore red robes because my sisters and I, we all had red bathrobes. I looked at them; I was so proud.”
The cutouts went atop the roof over the front porch. That house of her childhood, like Marcia’s house now, was about a story-and-a-half tall, so getting the cutouts up there and secured was no easy task. Strings of lights lined the home’s easier-to-get-at gutters.
“That was about as far as we ever went with decorating,” Marcia’s mother, Virginia Nyquist, says, her mind sifting through 90 years of living at the head of the Great Lakes. “We always decorated inside the house, too. But that was just something fun to do. We didn’t go all out for prizes or anything. We never entered any lighting contests. We were never that good. Ours were pretty small. But we did go around every year to see everybody else’s lights.”
And every holiday season, the family piled into the car, like so many families still do.
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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 wife Marcia decided to turn their yard full of holiday decorations into something spectacular enough to enter in 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 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,” 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 the city lighting contest. Her husband, Alan, begrudgingly bought a 24-foot ladder for the task 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 a mighty shake until some of the strings of lights filtered down and tumbled into the lower branches.
Done, he grunted, and glad of it.
A few days later came a knock on the door. A young couple stood in the cold evening darkness. The woman shivered, her hood up, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She hopped from foot to foot. The young man didn’t even have 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 farther out of the warm house than absolutely necessary to consider his guests. The 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,” Alan and Marcia would come to call her.
No matter how it happened, there was little doubt: An angel appeared at the well-known backyard, walk-through holiday display of Marcia Hales and Alan Nylen. An angel.
This issue’s Journal writer: Chuck Frederick, editorial page editor for the Duluth News Tribune, has worked more than 20 years as a reporter and editor. He is the author of several regional books.