The shining
It's worth a trip, the light fantastic
String it and they will come.
That's what Dominic Luberto concluded when he put an understated 250,000 Christmas lights on and around his bizarro stone mansion on the Arborway.
They did.
Every evening, families pour out of SUVs and minivans to get a dose of the wonder of it all. The cars, sometimes by the score, pull over to the side of the road, their emergency blinkers on.
You think something very bad has happened until you realize it's merely something very weird that has happened. A quarter of a million twinkles. Think Thomas Edison on acid.
"You need sunblock," advises a man pushing a stroller.
From a distance, the colossus rises in the dark like a ghost ship at sea. Up close, it's Disneyland meets Christmas Eve. Luberto, like Liberace, favors wretched excess. He is as taken by huge inflatables as he is by lights, and he casts a wide net for Yuletide icons. Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse surface along with multiple iterations of Santa.
People arrive like pilgrims at Lourdes with digital cameras and cellphones to record the scene. Some never leave their car. Others peruse the bulbs like pigs out for truffles. Most are dumbfounded. "Is this a museum?" asks one woman.
While the pilgrims gawk, la famiglia Luberto remains inside, shades drawn, so all you see are legs ambulating in and out of rooms like something surreal from Bunuel.
There is something very American about Luberto, born in Argentina of Italian parents -- a mix of ego, altruism, and the willful determination to do what he damned well pleases. Our country is teeming with people like him who go berserk over pink flamingos or angel topiary.
His Christmas light psychosis first appeared in less virulent form in 2000, before he moved to the Arborway. His malady is now in full flower, and we ache for the unfortunate neighbors who must feel as if the mother ship from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" lands next to their bedrooms every night.
I ask him how he can he sleep with the lights, which stay on until 12:30 a.m. He says, "I'm sleeping with 250,000 lights on, and I sleep like a baby." But what about neighbors who can't? "There's always a grinch at Christmas."
Yo, Dominic -- ever hear of the Golden Rule?
But credit him with thinking big. Brace yourselves because he's planning to double the number of lights next year to a breathtaking 500,000 -- visible, I'm guessing, from the International Space Station.
Luberto says he's a retired musician. I don't know many retired musicians who can spend over a million bucks on a house and then drop ten thousand on lights, but never mind. His electric bill this month runs $1,900. He claims that
Say this for Luberto: He provides what the city of Boston does not -- major Christmas glitter. We are as transfixed by lights as we are by fireworks, and the ones strung on the trees in the Common are a pallid yawn. No moxie. People hear about the display chez Luberto and hightail it to the Arborway.
"We went to the Common and were really disappointed," confirms Eileen Fox, in from Kansas with her daughter to visit her mother. "Someone told us about this so we came here. This is incredible."
Christmas decorations have taken big hits over the years because of budget cuts and municipal sensitivity to the other religious and cultural celebrations like Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. Most creches on public space are gone, for all the right reasons. (There is, however, a figure in a creche-like thing on the Common that looks suspiciously like the baby Jesus. No one seems to notice or mind.)
The result of all this is we don't have much of anything anymore.
I ask Luberto if Jews and Muslims are offended by his Christmas extravaganza. He says no. "I don't put the baby Jesus out front," he says. "A lot of Jewish people see the lights. Chinese and Japanese people love the lights."
The place did in fact resemble the UN the nights I was there. People came for the lights, not a Socratic pursuit of the religious significance of Santa.
Cultural bullies like Bill O'Reilly rail against the rise of "Happy Holidays" over "Merry Christmas." Most of us are fine with "Happy Holidays." But people should realize that a large majority of Americans have "Merry Christmas" in their DNA.
We repeated it like mynah birds for years, and we still offer "Merry Christmas" to kindred spirits, just as Jews say "Happy Hanukkah" to each other and African-Americans exchange "Happy Kwanzaa." Every now and then we say the wrong thing to the wrong person. None of us should be drawn and quartered for these linguistic transgressions.
What we all need to do is take a deep breath and accept the good will behind lapses of language. The republic stands. Tolerance is at the heart of every religion worth its salt. And however unhinged his Christmas spirit, Dominic Luberto puts on a jaw-dropper. I'm just glad I'm not his neighbor.
Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com. 