Decorating the Osborne family Christmas tree

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The lights display that first year hardly stood out by the average decorating displays of the era. There were approximately a thousand lights. Try not to guffaw at the thought of a legendary holiday exhibition such as The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights featuring only a thousand lights. 

From such humble beginnings, a shared love emerged. Mother, father, and daughter discovered their mutual enjoyment of shopping for the perfect Christmas lights and then putting them on the walls of their home. In year two, the holiday decorations escalated into something worthy of a drive for the other citizens of Little Rock.

The evolution of The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights is well known by this point. In seven years, the once precocious six-year-old was now 13. Breezy's holiday expectations grew along with her. Her adoring father had expanded their holiday decorations so much that the millionaire had to do something truly eccentric. He purchased the two adjacent homes in order to have more room for his holiday display. It’s not quite as extravagant as Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, but buying two homes simply to have better December decorations is, well, wasteful at best.

What’s involved in upgrading a thousand-light set of Christmas decorations into a three-house extravaganza? For starters, the Osborne clan added approximately three million lights. They even introduced an entire nativity scene to emphasize the religious symbolism of the event. Then, they employed a massive globe to highlight the placement of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Bethlehem, Palestine, the two most important locations for the event.

The circular driveway included rotating carousels of lights, which added visual wonder and pageantry to the proceedings. Since no holiday decoration is complete without a Christmas tree, the family constructed a seven-story tall one right on top of their kitchen. The tree featured three different colors to enhance the holiday spirit, and the driveway alone included 70,000 lights, a factor of seventy more than the 1986 decorations.

If your mind immediately starts to wonder about their electric bill, you’re not the only one. The family patriarch stubbornly refused to provide hard numbers about his joint venture with his daughter. At one point, the local utility company, Arkansas Power and Light, offered their insights on the topic. Without adding specific details, they acknowledged that the December utility bill for the lights show rivaled the average annual bill for citizens of Little Rock.

Two points emphasize the absurdity of the situation. The first is that the display took on a life of its own to the point that the Osborne family had to hire a full-time engineer. His sole job was literally to keep the lights on at the Osborne house(s). The other is that the display drained so many resources that one year when Jennings flipped the power switch for the first time, he blew the breaker for the entire neighborhood. And that was probably the moment that directly led to…

Angry neighbors aka wear your sunglasses at night

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How would you feel if you were a neighbor of Jennings Osborne? It’d be like living next to Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation, only ramped up several orders of magnitude. There were THREE MILLION lights. Take the time to count how many lights you have stored in your holiday boxes. Then, perform some multiplication to understand just how massive an undertaking the Osborne family offering eventually became.

Today, many cities seem to have that one home whose holiday decorations are so festive that people drive across town to enjoy the view. In the early 1990s, the Osborne situation was still somewhat of a novelty. Given the larger-than-life persona of the Santa Claus-shaped microbiologist and the ostentatious nature of his light show, locals swarmed the accompanying roads to see the sights.

For the other people who lived on Robinwood Street and Cantrell Road, the entire situation was a nightmare. December is always a busy time for homeowners, whether they celebrate the holidays or not. Retail shopping and end-of-year get-togethers force people to travel more often than normal. Suffice to say that the logistics of the Osborne Family Spectacle V1.0 caused many trials and tribulations for the rest of the people living on the block.

Over time, people alerted the media that they needed as long as two hours simply to drive to the grocery store during December, the month when the lights were on display. It was a five-minute trip otherwise. Traffic escalated by a factor of dozens when the rest of Little Rock headed to Robinwood Street to see the lights. And the lights themselves were no picnic. It was the holiday decoration equivalent of staring directly at the sun. Neighbors complained that they had to purchase thicker drapes and shades to reduce the glare caused by millions of Christmas lights.

Jennings Osborne was an accomplished businessman with a generous disposition and a terrific personality. He was also a terrible neighbor, at least in December. When the other residents asked that he dial down the lights a bit, Osborne responded by adding more. Three million more. It’s simultaneously an obnoxious and hysterical response, although the people living there understandably found little amusement. The butting of heads put the microbiologist and six of his most opinionated neighbors on a legal collision course.

The lawsuit that went viral

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While a Rashomon aspect exists with regards to the he said/she said nature of the Osborne Christmas Lights lawsuit, all parties acknowledge a few pertinent details. For 35 days each year, Robinwood Street and Cantrell Road featured one of the most dazzling light shows in the United States. Pilots confirmed that they could see the light show from 80 miles above. The people residing on Cantrell Road in particular suffered, because the three Osborne homes directly faced that road.

In addition to the complaints above, a very serious problem existed. Due to the ridiculous level of traffic near the decoration event, cars couldn’t get through easily. The other people living there rightfully worried about emergency situations. No early responders could navigate their way to a crisis situation in acceptable time, and every second counts in such situations. A delay of a few minutes could literally stand as the difference between life and death for people living on these streets. While everyone loves Christmas decorations, nobody wants to die because of them.

For his part, Jennings Osborne was resolute on the point that he owned three different houses on the block. He paid for everything out of his own pocket, including special dispensations to the utility board to ensure that his lights no longer endangered everyone else. They operated on their own transformer system. He felt that he’d been more than fair with his neighbors and remained resolute that he would not shut down something that pleased his daughter so much.

The war was on.