Desert Hills couple decks the house with Santas
by Jim Crawford

DESERT HILLS – Go to Mike and Barbara Mulvenna’s home in Desert Hills and register your reaction.

“Wow” is a good word. “Unbelievable.” Or maybe “Merry Christmas!” with a huge exclamation point best sums up the holiday spirit adorning the Mulvenna’s house.

The Mulvennas probably have the largest Santa Claus collection in existence–or at least in Arizona.

To enter their front door is to enter into a virtual playhouse full of all things Santa and Christmas.

Santa is everywhere. Short ones. Tall ones. In‑between ones. Glass ones. Wooden ones. There are Santas in trees, in bushes, even one on a Harley. And they’re everywhere visitors look.

“They come from everywhere,” Barbara says of the couple’s collection. “From Kmart to collectible stores. Probably the most unique or unusual is the old world Santa. We don’t know how old he is, but he’s definitely a collector’s item. There are Santas from Spain and Italy and all over the world.”

If you’re going to be obsessed with something, it might as well be something fun, is Mike’s philosophy.

“It all started when we lived in California,” Mike recalls. “It was just a Santa and a few lights. Then I just sort of went crazy.”

Now the scene is like visiting the Grand Canyon. You have to see it to believe it.

“When we first started collecting, if it was a Santa, we bought it,” Barbara says. “Then we became a little more selective. Now we look for the unique or unusual Santas. We’ve gotten a bunch of them at Costco.

At first we’d try and not duplicate them. We’d get home and discover we already had one like it.”

The vast Santa collection is not just for the Mulveenas to hoard for themselves. Far from it. Every year since moving to the area three years ago, Mike has decorated his home and property with a dazzling display of lights and sound.

“This is the fourth year we’ve done this,” he says. “We have an open house for the neighborhood, and they come in and try to guess the number of Santas we have displayed. We give a Santa for the first and second closest guesses. All I can say is this year there are more than the 844 there were last year.”

The couple usually starts preparing the weekend after Thanksgiving to get ready in time for the Christmas season. The process usually takes one day or a week, depending on which of the two is telling the story.

“I’ve probably got 60 hours in the lights,” Mike says. “I’ve got all of the wires buried with an outlet at all of the plants in the yard. This year I buried 13,000 feet of wire. There are 75, 000 lights. I’m probably done with the lights because I don’t have any place else to put them.”

Outside there are gingerbread men jumping on a trampoline, snowmen throwing snowballs at each other, and elves on a teeter totter, plus many more visuals to marvel at.

All of the lights are choreographed to traditional Christmas carols. There are 13 different songs and visitors can listen by tuning their radios to 99.9 on their FM dial.

You don’t have to be a kid to enjoy the spirit of Christmas, but it helps, Mike says.

“I always tell everybody I do this all for the kids, even the big kids.”

Barbara says she is usually the one who says ‘Bah humbug’ when it comes time to start the decorating process every year.“But I know in my heart that I’ll be the first one out the door to go and get another Santa,” she admits. “It’s nice to see that the weather is nice enough to decorate outside because we’d never have enough room in the house.”

Catherine Weickhorst, Barbara’s mother, makes the trip from her home in Michigan every year to be a part of the Santa celebration.

“Besides the warm weather, I come here every year just to see everything,” she said. “It’s beautiful and so much fun.”

The neighbors’ reaction was a major consideration when Mike started his decorating.

“We actually didn’t know what the neighbors were going to think when we first did this. They love it. There’ll be about 50 people here for the open house, and about 20 kids to visit with the real Santa.”

Making people happy at Christmas makes the Mulvennas happy as well.

“It’s just a whole lot of fun,” Mike says.