How to decorate your home like a Richmond Tacky Lights home

Picture this: you’re watching “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” while tipping back your second generous pour of eggnog.

At the big moment when Clark Griswold is finally powering up 25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights stapled to the roof of his suburban Chicago home, you have an epiphany: You’re going to DIY your own massive tacky lights display.

You're going to be on the Richmond Times-Dispatch Tacky Light tour.

Now what?

If you’re Al Thompson, it’s obvious. You drive around town, stopping and talking to anyone with an extravagant display. Because that’s exactly what he did decades ago when the metaphorical lightbulb flipped on over his head.

Now Al and Esther Thompson’s radiant Henrico County home is a destination for wannabe tacky lights artists. Not only did their Glen Allen display win ABC’s “The Great Christmas Light Fight,” but their handiwork has also been featured on the “NBC Nightly News” and “CBS This Morning.”

“I’m pretty outgoing,” said Thompson, 76. “I’m out there every night and I’m talking to all kinds of people.”

According to his meticulously maintained guestbook, revelers from all 50 states and 135 countries have visited “Christmas on Wendhurst.”

One of the most popular topics for aspiring tacky lights artists? Power. And that’s for good reason.

DIY’ing tacky lights displays can be more “Home Alone” than “Christmas Vacation” — falling off ladders, absorbing blunt force — and yes, getting electrocuted.

“I’ve been shocked quite a few times,” said Bobby Phifer, whose Asbury Court home sits beside the home he grew up in. That’s where Phifer, another winner of “The Great Christmas Light Fight,” found his spark five decades ago as an 11-year-old who stumbled upon a strand of lights in the backyard shed.

The rest is history. For the past 49 years, Phifer and family have been lighting up their Tuckahoe neighborhood in Henrico.

“I give advice out all year,” said Phifer, who downsized from two displays to one when he sold the home of his late mother last year. “And I learn a lot of things from others, too.”

He added: “People can say ‘I’m a master electrician’ or ‘I’m a master plumber.’ There’s no master Christmas lights guy.”

Phifer and Thompson are about the closest it gets in the Richmond area, given the moniker of “The Tacky Lights Capital of the World” by the city’s former Mayor Dwight Jones. Watch the parade of limos and buses lining the streets where the Phifers and Thompsons live, and it’s a name and reputation that’s clearly stuck like a tongue on a flagpole after a double-dog dare. And in a day when homeowners who have the bright idea to super-size their holiday can simply call on YouTube to light the way, Phifer and Thompson keep it old school.

“I do zero social media,” Phifer said. In fact, he said he sees a lot of bad information on social platforms, where newbies have questioned methods he’s been successfully using for decades.

Thompson goes as far as to make his own wooden decorations, which now total more than 2,300. Many of the pieces are interactive, even asking onlookers to do a little math (e.g., How many actual gifts are given in “The 12 Days of Christmas?”)

The Phifer’s trademark is a couple of 80-foot trees lit all the way up.

Of course, it takes time to get there — not just the decades of trial and error, but the annual setup.

“You need a lot of motivation,” said Thompson, who estimates that it takes him 640 hours over 2½ months.

Sometimes, you just need to get lucky, too.

That’s exactly what happened to Phifer when he fell into a bin of brand-new, commercial grade LED lights scrapped by Kings Dominion and sent to a recycling center. A worker there was a regular visitor to the “A Phifer Christmas” display — and hooked him up.

Finally, don’t forget about the sacrifice.

“At night we don’t use the stove, washer or dryer,” said Phifer, who upgraded his home’s electrical system to 400 amps to power his display.

“You don’t just think, ‘I need to save electricity,” he said. “You think, ‘I need to save electricity so I can do more.’”

As for the cost of decorating your home with a mega-wattage display, Howell “Craig” Harper, a spokesperson for Dominion Virginia, said, “I can tell you for the vast majority of customers, their heating cost will drastically outpace what they spend on lights. The impact on their bill would depend on the lights they chose — our Virginia residential rates are typically around 11.66 cents per kilowatt-hour.”

According to Christmas Light Source, an electricity cost calculator, 50,000 C7 lights would cost about $29.15 per hour to run, while the same number of LED lights would only cost $3.79 per hour.

Of course, there is an easier way to deck out your house for the holidays — a way that’s the polar opposite of the painstaking DIY approach.

You can all in the professionals.

“We try to make our service as all-inclusive as possible so the customer gets the most out of it,” said James Zogran, head of operations for Dominion Lightworks, a Manakin Sabot-based outfit that handles both commercial and residential holiday lighting, including several homes on Monument Avenue.

“We’ll help come up with a design, complete the install… and be in and out in a matter of hours, setting everything up on timers.”

And they’ll pack it all up and repeat, all while you can kick back by the fire with a warm cup of cocoa.

But not everything comes included with professional setup — the conversations, the laughs, and the imparting of advice to visitors.

“This is our life from Thanksgiving through Christmas,” said Phifer.

“When things slow down a little bit, you can actually sit down and talk to people.”