Derry's Corey Mendonca is plugged in to Christmas
Dec. 11—I t started when Corey Mendonca was just a little kid catching sight of a neighbor's sparkling outdoor Christmas lights.
"And it's turned into — this," he says, sweeping his hand across a kaleidoscope of color outside his rented home at 12 Beacon St. in Derry. "It's grown over the years. Excessively," he adds with a grin.
Reindeers prance across the roof. A multi-hued tunnel of lights arches over the driveway. Lighted evergreen trees in the yard extend toward a sprinkling of stars in the sky. There are Santas, snowmen and nutcrackers as well as oversized candy canes and a myriad of critters including teddy bears, dogs, a goose, and even a Bumble.
In all, there are about 60,000 lights aglow here.
It helps that Mendonca is an electrician by trade. But mostly, it's a lifelong holiday spirit that powers this and many other displays he's crafted at the places he's called home over the years.
He recalls one memorable year when he was a teenager going Griswold on the family's home on Sunset Circle in Derry, something that didn't go over very well with the tenants living in the other side of the duplex. When they voiced objection to lights and decorations, Mendonca meticulously decorated just his family's side of the structure, from the ground up to the face of the building onto the roof.
"I literally split the house in half, right down to decorating just one side of the walkway. It was hilarious," he says, laughing.
Flash forward and he's now a dad, indoctrinating children, ages 2 and 12, into the spirit of the holidays.
"When I had my first boy, it was like Christmas started all over again for me, and now I get to see it through two kids' eyes. It's fun."
Mendonca says he has an old-school approach to holiday decorating. He hasn't jumped on synchronized-music trends, with their constantly changing whirl of designs and patterns, and he's moving away from inflatables. Those are temperamental in winter weather, often deflating into frozen heaps on the lawn.
The same goes for the holiday movies he favors. Forget sequels. Give him the nostalgic stop-action animation of the 1960s and 1970s in Rankin/Bass Productions classics like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (featuring that famous Bumble) and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," and bring on the now-iconic 1980s comedies like "A Christmas Story" and "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation."
Unlike Chevy Chase's frenzied Clark Griswold, Mendonca has a laid-back way of talking. He chats amiable with passersby, offering tips and pointing out many of the hand-crafted wooden displays he's made and decorations he's found in stores or online during end-of-season sales, including last year's purchase of 20,000 lights for about $100.
His face lights up when he introduces his latest find, a green-lit alligator he picked up for $5.
Mendonca has moved around New Hampshire and Massachusetts quite a bit over the years, but he's always brought his love of Christmas with him and looked for ways to reinvent or add to his displays.
A camper that turned out to be a lemon of a vehicle has been repurposed into a selfie station and collection point for donations for Toys for Tots. It's locked at night and under surveillance at all times.
Mendonca, who recently moved back to Derry from Lynnfield, Mass., said last year he collected over 1,300 gifts, and hopes he can match that amount in his first year back in the Granite State. People have until Dec. 14 to donate gifts between 6 a.m. and 8:30 p.m.
On a recent Monday night, his mother, Kathleen Mendonca of Deerfield, is dropping off her first load of toy donations.
"My grandkids do well at (Christmastime) but there are other kids who don't. These kids don't get spoiled," she says. "It's all in the spirit of fun."
Mendonca's outdoor display will be lit up into January from 4:30 or 5 p.m. until about 10 p.m. nightly. He's posted the location on a couple of New Hampshire-based Facebook pages: "Light Up New Hampshire" and "Christmas Lights in Southern NH."
"It's so calming to stand out here and look at it," he says.
Still, he wasn't able to fit everything that's in his Christmas stockpile onto his new place in Derry.
"I have a 12-foot clock tower that tells the real time, a 12-foot silhouette of a church, and a whole bunch of houses the same size as that toy store," he says pointing to a hand-painted display made out of plywood.
He also has 10,000 white lights tucked away.
He hopes someday he has a bigger house — and outdoor canvas.
