Every Christmas, people from all over San Diego visit Christmas Card Lane, a neighborhood famous for its holiday light displays and painted boards of Christmas-themed greetings. One of these houses is the Incredibles House, where almost all of the walls, roof, and front yard are lined with Christmas lights, and the yard features festive boards of characters from The Incredibles.
The family behind this house is the Adamsons. Since moving in 2013, Lexie and Bryan Adamson have been slowly adding more and more lights to their house. This year, the Incredibles House has around 80,000 lights on display; however, Lexie said that when they bought the house, they didn’t intend to add that many.
“When we bought [the] house, it was advertised as a Christmas Card Lane house, and I was like ‘that’ll be fun,’ not knowing the extent of what it would become,” Lexie said. “The first year we lived here, we had a few strands of lights and then little by little, we’ve added more and more lights every year.”
The Adamsons slowly built their stockpile of lights by buying them on clearance after Christmas.
“It became that every year [we would] add a new project based on the lights we had bought, and now those have become like a staple,” Lexie said. “This year, we added a whole bunch of curtain lights in the walkway up to our door, and we just [find] new projects every year that help us add to the amount of lights that we have.”
In 2014, Lexie and Bryan decided to turn their house into the Incredibles House in part because of their love for the movie’s soundtracks. They are both musicians, so the PQ community choir and the wind band that Lexie participates in sometimes come to perform at their house.
“We chose [The Incredibles] because it was one of our favorite Disney movies,” Lexie said. “It has some of the best music, so that helped us choose what we wanted to do.”
Setting up 80,000 lights takes time, so the Adamsons start decorating the day after Halloween and work on it every weekend from then on to get the entire display set up in time for the start of December.
For Lexie, the best part of decorating their house is seeing the excitement and festivity their house brings to visitors.
“Seeing the joy that people get [is the best], and we always get to meet people and get to hear their stories,” Lexie said. “I was just sitting outside, and I saw all of these cameras pointing towards my house and there was a guy proposing to his girlfriend. We were so excited that they did that, and then we invited them up to come by the fire and celebrate. If they visit [San Diego], they [will] stop by our house and update us.”
Although nothing requires the neighborhood to participate, Lexie says that contributing to Christmas Card Lane has been a worthwhile activity.
“I love Christmas Card Lane,” Lexie said. “I love the community aspect of it. We don’t have any sort of HOA or anything that requires us to do it; it’s just people doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. We do it for the community. This season is all about magic and spirit, and we find a way to help people experience those feelings. It’s a lot of work, but it’s fun, and it makes people happy, so that’s what the world needs.”
