Painting the Night

A total of 17 soldiers stand at attention, strategically placed around an old wagon sitting on 40 acres pinched between Sleeping Buffalo and Saco at 4 p.m. The sun is setting in the east and surrounding the soldiers are two snowmen, a dozen candles which read "noel" down their sides, and, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Claus.

If you didn't know to look at them, you would fly right past on Highway 2 at this time of day. In an hour, when it is nice and dark, it is a different story.

"Maybe 100,000 lights?" Linda Zirkle asks her husband, Maynard.

"Well, I don't know if there are that many," Maynard answers his wife (later, Maynard admits that at one point, he has had as many as 14,000 bulbs up.)

The couple moved to the area in 2007 and almost every year since they have lit up the night's sky with a Christmas display of lights unmatched in the area, a family tradition the couple brought with them from Virginia. Aside from the Christmas figures set out in the field in front of their home, the house itself is festooned with lights. The first year the Zirkles set their lights up during the holidays in Big Sky Country, they turned a few heads.

"We put them out that year and then left in mid December to go back to Virginia for Christmas," Linda recalls. "Well, the gentleman who owned this house before us (Will Copple) got calls from people in Glasgow calling him and telling him to go out and put the lights on ...He said 'I can't, I sold that house'."

Maynard, an electrician, said that he initially started going above and beyond with Christmas decorations – the Zirkles favorite holiday --- about 45 years ago after traveling around his neighborhood and admiring the decorations of others.

"I figured it would be interesting to do and I have been doing it ever since," he said. "It just kept getting bigger and bigger."

Decorating the property starts in early October for the Zirkles each year, when it is not too cold out, and takes several weeks to complete. The couple gives Thanksgiving its due and don't turn the lights on until the day after Turkey Day. From there and up until Christmas Eve, the lights can be seen on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

"If you are coming past on a Monday or Tuesday, and you want to see the lights, just give us a call and we will turn them on for you," Linda said. "And then on Christmas Eve we leave them on all night."

The Zirkles ran wire all along their fence – over 1,000 feet – in order to keep that area bright with lights without blowing circuits (after a few years of trial and error.) Each night at around 5 p.m. Linda heads upstairs and Maynard heads to the basement. Linda is on a mission to plug lights into outlets in the home's bedrooms where lights sit in and around the windows and then closes the room's doors for maximum exposure. Maynard's basement trip takes him to a large grey box with four switches that ignites all the lights outside.

"It used to take us about five or ten minutes to turn them all on, but now it takes two or three," Linda said.

Linda recounted a story told to her by a friend in which the friend –traveling through the area late one night – came across the lights during her travels. The Zirkle property sits in such a way that it is hard to see the lights until one is right on top of them.

"This lady was tired and traveling at night and came across the house and thought she had reached the next city," Linda laughed. "She woke right up. We have all kinds of fun little stories like that."

Linda admitted that the power bill in December is generally about $100 higher than the rest of the year. Maynard said the lights don't come down until the spring in order to get the strings of lights down without breaking the wires. He re-wraps each string of lights after taking care to plug each one in inside the house to see if any bulbs are bad. The wrapped lights are then stored away in plastic grocery bags and put inside boxes. Maynard said he rarely gets his strings knotted-up and said the best time to replenish strings of lights is after Christmas, during clearance, at box stores.

The Zirkles added that everyone is welcome to drive up their driveway and take a look at the lights this or any other Christmas season.