Somerville Illuminations
Somerville, Mass.
Through early January 2024
How many different ways can you decorate your yard for the holidays? You might opt for the classy, minimal look with classic winter colors. You might choose a whimsical aesthetic with bright and multicolored lights, or you might prefer an over-the-top look with giant inflatables. Or, if you’re 61 Putnum St. in Somerville, you might decide to create a portal to a prehistoric hellscape featuring a T‑Rex nativity and elves being torn to shreds by the skeletons of demon hellhounds while a raptor skeleton in a Santa hat flies overhead.
Illuminations is a month-long, self-guided tour of holiday light displays around Somerville. The website for 2023 lists 43 houses stretching all around Somerville. The Somerville Bike Advisory Committee has also created a bike tour and map, and while there used to be a trolley tour, the website notes it’s been discontinued due to increasing prices and in an effort to keep the event as free and as inclusive as possible. The Somerville Arts Council’s website features an interactive map as well as a sneak preview photo of each participating house, but it’s an event that has to be seen in person to be appreciated. As with Porchfest, trick-or-treating, or people watching, the fun is in its spontaneity and in being surprised by what you might stumble across.
During a time of year when it’s easy to get cooped up inside after dark, Illuminations is a great excuse to get some walking in after work. Because the territory the map covers is so large, I ended up going twice; I still saw only a fraction of the participating houses. The online map can be a bit awkward to navigate on mobile, so I found it was best to arrive with fingerless gloves, extra layers, and a game plan for a hybrid drive/walk route planned out in advance.
Sometimes the houses I was heading for were obvious even from multiple blocks away. 7 Ames Street made an entire dark corner glow bright with a jam-packed display featuring animatronic glowing animals (including dinosaurs, unicorns, a giraffe, and a pig with wings) and a rotating ferris wheel filled with festive stuffed animals. Other times, the houses on the map were outshone by the deliciously decorated houses of random neighbors, and their displays became unexpected bonuses to my safari.
There was a unique personality in almost every house’s display, with many featuring a distinct theme, hand-crafted elements, or a certain amount of individualized quirk. After the initial “oooh!”s and “aaah!”s at the initial impact of each house I spent a long time delighting at the little details of their displays. In true Bostonian fashion, there were quite a number of skeletons and Halloween decorations snuck in alongstide the traditional Christmas iconography, but there were also Minions, flamingos, dinosaurs, wreaths in the shape of Mickey Mouse, leprechauns, and other hidden Easter eggs (to borrow the term). 55 School St. had an illuminated goose on top of their porch projecting rainbow colors and a flamingo on top of the garage dressed in a Santa outfit. A Cinderella carriage glowed in the front yard surrounded by gumdrops and candy canes in some sort of nonsensical magical Wonderland.
At the end of my night I passed by 13 Holyoke Rd. and saw a small group of people standing together in the street, transfixed by a musical light display. It was a beautiful sight. The watchers were illuminated by the warm glow of the display, and appeared almost as though they had been drawn out of their nearby houses to watch, enchanted.
As the group dispersed, I walked over to the control panel that activated the music and met the creator of the light display, Tristan Cunha. Contrary to what I assumed, Cunha told me he’s not some kind of crazy engineer. His display is the product of discovering that there are entire communities online dedicated to creating these types of synchronized light displays and that there’s an enormous amount of information available online, almost all of it open source and free software, and kits are available for the hardware.
But that doesn’t mean it’s simple — there’s still a lot of assembly required. Cunha noted he learned to solder just so that he could build the display, and still has to program every single beat of the music and every line of string light.
“The first year it took me months and months and months, and now I’ve got it down to where I can put the whole thing up in like a week,” he said.
Cunha has been participating in Somerville Illuminations for several years, and is drawn to the community aspects of creating a light show like this in an urban area, noting that a lot of similar displays are put on in suburbia for people to drive past in their cars and how Illuminations can be a more personal point of connection for the community. He also reminisced about the Illuminations trolley, all the lights in the neighborhood, and how whole generations of families used to live on a street together in Somerville with their houses all lit up. “I feel like we’ve been getting less and less of that every year,” he said, “I’m trying to reverse that trend.”
