'She Can’t Miss Us!'

For Nicole Morrow, her brother, Brett, sister, Jamie, and father, Tim, the 125,000 Christmas lights that adorn their 485 Springdale Avenue house in Hatboro are a type of therapy.

“Our mother, who loved the holiday and went to the extreme every Christmas, passed away on December 15, 1987,” Nicole said. “After that, Christmas stopped for a few years. It just wasn’t the same without her.”

But in the late 1990s, Nicole’s brother began putting Christmas lights up and every year the display got bigger and bigger.

“[The display] is definitely a type of therapy for our family,” Nicole said.

“We put the lights up to let her know we haven’t forgotten about her. She can look down and see where we are - she can’t miss us!”

Nicole surmises that her family’s love for impressive Christmas displays comes from both their mother and grandmother.

“My grandmother used to have lots of lights up, and one year the news stations came out on Christmas and put it on the morning show,” Nicole said.

“It puts a little smile on your face and makes everything sad go away,” Nicole added about large displays like her grandmother’s.

Almost every square-inch of the front and sides of the modest two-story Springdale Avenue home are decked out with lights of all colors and sizes. The family even covers the grass with strands of holiday lights.

“This year we have 125,000 lights. We had to scale it back this year but we used to have 150,000,” she said. “People tell us all the time it looks like a gingerbread house.”

Nicole told Patch cars line the street to look at the lights and people from as far away as New York come down to see the display.

Work to setup the display begins in early November and wrapped up around the first of December. For one of the first weekends this year, the brought Santa on a firetruck to kickoff the display.

“One of the most popular things, whether young or old, male or female, is the model train that runs outside the home,” Nicole said.

The family collected donations of new or unopened toys for the Marines Corps’ Toys for Tots program. As of last week, more than four large boxes of toys were donated.

“We thought so many people drove by, why don’t we try to do it up a notch,” Nicole said with a warm smile on her face.

The family plans to keep the lights on until the end of the month and Nicole expects to see lots of smiling faces as Christmas draws closer.