By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Dan Powell
From our December 2024 issue
Every Thanksgiving, Dan Powell gathers with his family and about a hundred friends and acquaintances for a “Lights On” party. Powell, whose round face and bushy brown beard recall a boyish Santa Claus, serves hot cocoa and candy canes, then corrals the group for a Clark Griswold–style lighting reveal. “We count down from 10 in true Griswold fashion,” says Powell, who announces the event to followers of his exterior-illumination adventures on Facebook. Unlike the hapless protagonist of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, though, Powell always gets his display to turn on, setting his two acres of Hebron woods alight with 62,070 LED bulbs worth of twinkling holiday cheer.
Colorful string-light trees and an 18-foot-tall string-light snowman named Olaf Senior scale his home, whose walls swim with laser-projected dots and snowflakes. In the yard on one side, a glowing American flag is flanked by a 20-foot-tall conifer fashioned from lengths of red, white, and blue bulbs and a “waterfall” of blinking blue lights flowing into a glittering blue “pond.” On the other side, four-foot-tall wooden letters outlined in lights spell out JOY TO THE WORLD PEACE ON EARTH MERRY CHRISTMAS. Across the road, a row of string-light trees frames a bright-white cross and a luminous piano inside a shining purple heart, a tribute to Powell’s late piano-teacher mother. Every year, he adds new features. Last season, they included a wooden angel wrapped in blue lights, to honor victims of the Lewiston mass shooting. In 2017, Powell completed his masterwork: 75 string-light trees that cascade from cables suspended between real trees and a pair of sheds on a cleared acre across the road. He calls it the Forest of Lights. “You can go inside and be totally surrounded by light,” he says. His teenage son heads out to bask in the glow nearly every evening.
Powell was in high school when he first saw the potential for spreading joy through holiday lighting. One year, he decided to bedazzle his family’s Turner home with 8,000 colored lights, delighting his mother, who filmed the spectacle. In 2008, hoping to cheer up his wife, who’d just lost her grandfather, Powell surprised her by illuminating the wraparound porch and fence on the property they were renting in Auburn. She cried when she took in the scene. From then on, Powell decided, “Why not make it bigger and better?” Over the next five years, his displays grew ever more elaborate. “I was really good friends with my landlord,” Powell says. “He never helped me, but he paid for the electricity.”
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“There’s not a lot of cookie-cutter stuff out there when you’re going big like I do,” says Dan Powell, who builds his own wooden and PVC forms to bedazzle with lights, rather than purchasing ready-made decorations.
Since moving to Hebron, in 2013, Powell has settled into a routine. In mid-September, he begins unpacking two dozen bins of LED string lights, testing each strand and replacing spent bulbs. He also works on repairing existing props and constructing new ones. (This year, he’s building a 14-foot-diameter PVC wreath to hang on his house.) On November 1, he starts stringing. There have been setbacks over the years, from lights shorting out on wet tree branches to nor’easters ripping through displays. During a storm last December, a downed tree snapped a power line, plunging half of the Forest of Lights into darkness for the remainder of the season. “That was pretty heartbreaking,” he says.
Powell lives on a pitch-black, wooded stretch of Route 124 that is hidden from motorists traveling in either direction until they round a bend just before his house. He gauges the success of his displays by the number of cars that slow to a crawl in front of his property or, better yet, pull over. Sometimes, people get out of their vehicles to wander among the lights. “That makes my day,” he says.
To learn more about Dan Powell’s lighting adventures, follow Dan’s Lights on Facebook.
