NIGHT LIGHTS

The Vanhorn family lawn looks like a who’s who of Christmas.

There’s Santa on a chopper-style motorcycle, a cranky 7-foot Grinch, a Frosty snowman so tall it would take an acre of snow to build him from scratch. A movie plays on the brilliant white surface of their garage door. And the soundtrack to this scene? Not “Jingle Bells,” but rather the endless whisper of mechanized air, which is quickly becoming the melody of Christmas for lovers of inflatable displays.

“We enjoy it,” said Arlene Vanhorn. “Our grandkids enjoy it. Our kids think we’re crazy. They tell us we’re the Griswolds.”

The Griswolds, that movie family in “Christmas Vacation” with the mother of all holiday displays on their front lawn, are referred to often when the subject of inflatable Christmas displays arises. As decorations go, few are bigger or brighter than inflatables. The Wall Street Journal credited inflatables with the capability of “transforming front lawns into miniature Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades.”

And the displays are easy to store. Arlene Van Horn and her husband, Gene, have nearly two dozen of the displays, themed for every major holiday. The nylon decorations tower over the front lawn when inflated by a constant breath of air from a toaster-sized fan, but when deflated, fit in boxes slightly larger than a cubic foot.

Priced from $60 to more than $300, they have ruled at the cash register for the last several years.

Inflatables first hit the holiday scene in 2000, but still had a few quirks that kept them from flying off the shelf. The first inflatables, pioneered by Gemmy Industries, relied on hair driers for inflation and didn’t sell well. Second- generation inflatables were blown upright by box fans, which worked much better and were more suited for the outdoors.

Gene Vanhorn said those early box-fan models had problems. Inflatables collapse like giant balloons once the air is turned of. When the fan comes back on, the blades in the early models were dangerously close to the inflatable’s nylon body.

A patent lawsuit over the design of the very first inflatable decoration also got in the way. Gemmy and decoration rival Chrisha Creations became embroiled in a lawsuit over who first created inflatable decorations. According to U.S. District Court documents, both companies were working with Chinese industrialists to come up with an inflatable Santa. And both were represented in the Far East by the same agent. Gemmy accused Chrisha of learning about the inflatable concept from their mutual agent and the fight was on.

In the end both companies retained the right to make inflatable decorations. Their products are often sold side by side in stores. Wal-Mart offers Chrisha’s inflatable Santa coming out of a brick chimney as well as Gemmy’s Santa Claus riding a chopper.

Overall, Gemmy’s creations are easier to find. The company offers some big box retailers exclusive rights to particular designs. The 7-foot-tall Mickey Mouse and friends snow globe is sold exclusively at Kmart. Albertsons and Ace are the only sellers locally of inflatable Santa stuck in an Igloo. According to Gemmy’s Web site, www.gemmy.com, it is also retiring its designs after just one year in hopes of sparking a collector’s market. For Christmas alone, Gemmy sells 80 different inflatable decorations and it has the other major holidays covered as well.

Gemmy is no stranger to fad products. Big Mouth Billy Bass Jr., the first mounted rubber fish to sing Motown in the 1990s, was a Gemmy product. The company also has a full line of stuffed toy dancing mini hamsters that gyrate and sing.

If there’s a downside to inflatables, it’s how easily they can be destroyed, as residents on South Keller Road have found. Stemming southward off 16th Avenue, Keller is a street just two blocks long where neighbors go all out for Christmas. The Christmas displays of a dozen houses are synchronized to come on at 4:30 p.m. nightly. The lights come on and the inflatables spring to life. Carloads of onlookers stream down the street.

Vandals clobbered the neighborhood’s Christmas displays early Tuesday. Just about everything was salvageable with a little holiday triage, residents concluded, except for David Ross’s inflatables.

“They grabbed Dave’s carousel and ripped the top off it,” said Ralph Cornwall, a Keller neighbor. “It’s just kind of fortunate that a lot of the other things turned out to be salvageable.”

In response to the vandalism, and partly because so much of their show was unoperational, Keller neighbors staged a dark-out the night after the destruction. They’ve also added motion-triggered video cameras to their display for surveillance.

Holiday decoration diehard, Jerry Haight, keeps his inflatable decoration in his backyard safe from vandals and displays more durable, homemade decorations in front of his South McDonald Road home.

“I would probably never put it the front yard just for fear of attracting kids with not enough to do,” Haight said.

Instead, he has hand-cut plywood displays staked to the ground with steel that he pounded into the earth before the ground froze. His nativity scene is composed of hollow plastic characters that Haight fills with gravel. One year a vandal tried to make off with one of Haight’s wise men, but drag marks showed the display was only moved about a yard.

Plus, there’s another upside to old-school displays. Making them gets the entire Haight family involved, with Jerry doing the cutting, and his wife, Sue, and their children doing the painting. The end result is a Christmas experience that isn’t just blown air, but rather a breath of life.