It began innocently enough in the late 1960s or early ’70s, just a couple years after Bob and Connie Kunkle moved into their Leola home.
A few Christmas lights and decorations appeared in front of their 202 W. Main St. property, just a little something to help spread holiday cheer.
Things have changed — drastically — in the years since. Since their low-key beginnings, the Kunkles have year by year added to the dazzling collection of lights, expanding from the front yard to the roof, to the garage and shed out back, to the patio, to their yard’s perimeter.
A couple generations of locals have made the couple’s light display an annual pilgrimage. But this year’s display is the Kunkles’ last.
“Nobody wants to help!” Bob Kunkle says, half-jokingly. A daughter does come for a few November Saturdays to help, he says, but it’s still hour upon hour of work — “about 60 hours, one way or the other” — on his own.
Bob Kunkle is the first person to acknowledge that he can’t sit still, and his wife won’t argue that point. He’s “still around, in a roundabout way” at Stump’s Upholstery, the family business he’s been involved with for 56 years.
The top floor of their house is home to a massive train layout; the basement — which they expanded themselves years ago by hand-digging it — is a ’50s room they designed and built, complete with diner.
“This man has so much energy,” Connie Kunkle says of her husband, “and this really gave him an outlet to create something.”
So it’s no surprise that the Kunkles, once they started a light display, would end up with one big enough to draw a crowd. (By now the Kunkles have no idea how many lights are involved.)
Word spread. Neighbor Baron Zimmerman offered his adjacent driveway so there’s more room for visitors to circle through without tying up traffic along Route 23.
Any hesitation they may have had was swept away by, as Connie Kunkle says, “seeing people, especially children, coming in and looking around. Kids can’t wait to get here,” she says, “and some come two or three times a season.”
Work on the display starts in the last week of October, when Bob Kunkle begins hauling the lights out of garage storage and testing them. He’s gotten to the point, he says, “where, if they’re not lighting, I’ll fool with it for about 10 minutes, then out they go.”
Installation begins in earnest in mid-November, with the lights on at 5:15 p.m. every December day through Dec. 30. With one exception — a snowman on the eastern edge of their lawn that Connie Kunkle calls “our mascot” — the angels and carousel and penguin and all the other figures and lights are changed around to provide a new display each year.
Then the whole process needs to be reversed, with the entire display packed away in bitter-cold January.
The preparation, though, really is all year long. The couple always has been on the lookout for new displays and trends, once hauling home a great find from Texas; another time, snagging some unique lights from a gift shop in Oglebay near Wheeling, West Virginia.
People will stop year round when they see Bill or Connie working in the yard to ask, “This is the lights house, isn’t it?”
And it has been, for decades.
But come Dec. 30 this year, the giant display will go dark and the lights — which visitors can reserve now — will be officially sold and picked up.
Bob Kunkle has brought up the possibility of ending the display for several years, he says, until “I figured the only way to do it is to have (professional signmaker) Ronnie Martin make me a sign to post outside the house” announcing the end of an era.
What will the Kunkles — especially Bob, who says of their light display, “I guess I never grew up” — do when November rolls around next year?
“Well,” he says after a brief pause, “we might do a few lights next year. Just in front of the house.”
