Annandale homeowner goes all out on Christmas decorations

Who’s got the best holiday decorations in the Annandale/Mason area? One strong contender is 6800 Murray Lane in Sleepy Hollow Woods. The entire front of the house and yard is covered with lights – there are Christmas trees, wreaths, candy canes, Santas, snowflakes, reindeer, stars, and much more.

This year it took seven full days – eight or 10 hours a day – to put everything up, says homeowner Dave Fase. “It doesn’t seem like that much work, now that I’ve gotten more efficient at it.”

His daughters, ages 9 and 11, help a little, and his wife, Christy Fase, decorates the inside of the house, although “it’s not nearly as over the top as the outside. There’s nothing crazy inside,” Dave says.


He gets ideas for the display by driving around and looking at other extreme holiday decorations. He got the idea for a blue river of lights on the lawn from the Winter Walk of Lights at Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in Vienna. 

Dave is in construction so he built many of the structures himself, including the wood framed trees and the arches over the river.  

He adds something new every year. This year, it’s a picture of Clark Griswold from the “Christmas Vacation” movie in one of the windows. “Everyone calls me Griswold,” Dave says. 


“I guess I like the attention. I like the lights,” says Dave, when asked why go to all that trouble. 


When he was a child in Indiana, his brother put up the lights on their parents’ house. “When my brother went to college, I took it over,” he says. “And when we moved here, I picked it up again.” 


Fase hasn’t gotten any complaints. In fact, his next-door neighbor let him take over their entire front yard. He tries to be considerate to neighbors by turning off the lights at 9 or 10 p.m. 

Before the Fase’s moved to their current house a year and a-half ago, they lived further up Murray Lane for 10 years, where they also had a big Christmas light display. 

Related story: Extreme holiday decorations light up Annandale skies

The new house is bigger than their old one, he says, but it doesn’t have a garage. When they considered buying it, he says, “My first thought was, where I am going to store my Christmas decorations?” 


He solved that problem by putting up a second shed in the backyard; the original shed is also partly filled with decorations. 


The former garage, now a children’s playroom, is taken over every fall as a workroom, where Dave tests all the lights.

He installed a new electrical panel by the front door with about 30 outlets just for the lights, and there’s a timer so they all turn on at the same time. The family sees a $200 or $300 spike in their electric bill for the month. 


Altogether, Dave estimates he’s spent around $4,000 to $5,000 on decorations, but that’s over a 10-year period. He waits until after Christmas to buy stuff for the next year, and never buys anything unless its 50 or 75 percent off. “I’ll figure out how to use it after I buy it,” he says. 


He’s already thinking about next year – and possibly adding more music coordinated with the lights.