The night New Zealand's Christmas lights were turned on
Friday, 30 November 2018
Ellen Dick's lighting guy pulled through at the last minute this year, the day before Franklin Rd's famed Christmas lights display got switched on.
To celebrate, the 24-year-old fashioned a table out of pizza boxes in her electrified bouble-draped front yard, from which to watch droves of Aucklanders amble by on Saturday night while eating hashbrowns with friends and flatmates.
When the Aucklanders passed an unlit house, they darkly muttered things like 'not getting into the spirit of it here, are they'. Dick said she was relieved not to be facing such wrath.
This is the 26th year Franklin Rd residents have been decking their homes with extravagant Christmas lighting, drawing about 150,000 visitors to the street annually.
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'There's a common urban legend that electricity is free during December on Franklin Rd - I just want to state here and now that this is not true,' said Dick.
'We just wanted to come out and do something for the community.'
Walking beneath the road's fragrant maples, Freemans Bay locals Pamela and Richard Woolf said they were grateful for residents' 'generosity' in putting on a show for the rest of Auckland every year.
'It's a local institution,' said Pamela.
'These days Christmas can be so crass and commercial – this is just such a nice escape from that because it's about Christmas spirit. People using their imaginations, and for not commercial gain whatsoever.'
Displays ranged from a string of fairy lights wound round a cabbage tree, to elaborate scenes featuring reindeer and sleighs, to a huge underlit angel made out of corrugated iron.
Ross Thorby lives on Franklin Rd and helps organise the illuminative festivities.
'You see all the kids wandering up and down going 'ooh aah' and we've been going so long now that their parents were once the kids wandering up and down going 'ooh ah',' Thorby said.
'We're into that second and third generation, and that just really blows your mind…to think that we've done something, we've created three generations of memories for something that was merely a simple idea and something that hasn't cost the city anything.'
The residents get together to discuss ideas in November, but there are no hard and fast rules.
'There's no formality about it all, it just happens to be that you've got a street full of 115 houses who collectively, at the same time of the year, happen to put on Christmas lights. That's basically what it is.'
Although there are no rules for the displays, there has been the odd occasion to invoke council rules.
'The residents still have to live in this street, and having some kid on a trumpet continually playing 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas' for five hours a night is not on.'
Franklin Road was not alone in turning on the lights on Saturday. December 1 was the date that light displays were turned on across the country to mark the festive month, and count down until Santa shimmies down the chimneys.
Tovey Road in Nelson, West Plains in Invercargill, Timaru's Kauri St, and New Plymouth's Shelter Grove are all expected to heave with people wanting to soak up some Christmas spirit and take in the brightly decorated homes.
Carl Seaward turned on the lights for his place at 650 Shands Road in Christchurch on Friday night. He believed his show was the best in the country- 'it blows Franklin Road out of the water'.
Seaward has a rural property with a couple of buildings on that turns into a Christmas village all through December. His wife Maureen has motor neuron disease, and because she isn't able to travel, he sees it as his way of giving her Christmas for an entire month.
'Other people only have Christmas for a day or two. Ours lasts for an entire month.
'It's a total touch of madness.'