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11/23/2016 07:30 AMWhen Mark Reeves wants to turn on the lights at this time of year, he is not thinking about one or two bulbs. He is thinking about 350,000 at the Ivoryton Illuminations, scheduled to run from Saturday, Dec. 3 to Jan. 7, 2017, on the Green in the center of Ivoryton. The lighting will take place starting at 5 p.m. on Dec. 3, with Santa Claus appearing over the Ivoryton Playhouse to signal the start of the festivities. Ivoryton Illuminations is sponsored by the Ivoryton Village Alliance.
For the second year, North Main Street, running up one side of the Ivoryton Green, will be decorated with Mark’s addition to the festivities: a series of large 20 arches 20 feet at the base, festooned with intertwining multi-colored lights and featuring a light-wrapped ball hanging from the center. Mark experimented with the arches, made of PVC pipe, to find the best way to stabilize them so they would remain upright during the festivities.
“We don’t want them to blow down,” he explains.
Mark first saw a holiday light display that featured illuminated arches many years ago in his native California.
“It was an unbelievable light display and it included arches, and I fell in love with the arches,” he says.
He suggested adding arches to the Ivoryton Illuminations decorations and they went up for the first time last year.
He saw the balls, really a series of circular frames on which decorations can be wrapped, at a home supply store.
“When I saw those globes, it was a no-brainer. I had to buy them. That’s the fun of it,” he says.
Mark estimates he has between 40 and 50 globes waiting to go in his garage, which also has a pile of boxes of light strands, which come packed in packages of 100, as well as a huge supply of cable ties so the different strands of lights can be bound together. Putting on the cable ties, he says, is one of the most time-consuming tasks.
Still, not all Mark’s lights are for Ivoryton Illuminations, though he has donated some 10,000 lights to the show. Mark also does an impressive light show at his Ivoryton home, with some 20,000 to 30,000 lights. Several years ago, Mark tried putting lighted arches over his long driveway, but encountered an unexpected problem.
“The oil truck couldn’t get up,” he says.
The centerpiece of his own outdoor decorating is a zoo full of light-wrapped animals. These Mark doesn’t have to wrap himself; the animals come already decorated. Every year he adds to his collection that includes an elephant, a peacock, a penguin and new this year, a flamingo. Mark’s favorite, however, remains the dinosaur.
“I’m really a kid at heart,” he says when talking about the dinosaur.
The display, he says, delights his extended family, particularly his grandchildren.
“I love animals and the idea of having them out in the yard became an obsession with me,” he says. “We create our own little world of lights up here.”
And lighted animals are not the only menagerie in Mark’s yard. He and his wife dale also have a real life menageries including a mini-horse three goats and dogs and cats.
Mark, a building contractor by profession, is an expert photographer, a skill he developed on his own without lessons.
“For me, its been practice, learning all about light, composition, and seeing what I get,” he says.
He took all the photographs for the 2016 Essex Savings Bank annual calendar. The calendar photographs are landscape scenes of this area, but Mark has taken pictures regularly as he and Dale, inveterate travelers, visit localities from the Inca city of Machu Pichu in Peru to a habitat for humanity build in Romania. Working on construction in Romania, where he and Dale were quartered in an old army barracks, worked well for Mark, though he did not speak Romanian. Nonetheless, he said that he and the construction supervisor did speak a common language: “We both knew tools,” he says.
Mark and Dale, who love watching BBC programs shown on television in this country, once did a driving tour in England that concentrated on locations that were used in the programs, among them Foyle’s War and Doc Martin.
“We mapped out the filming locations,” Mark explains.
They also love traveling in the United States, often by car.
“We love road trips in this country. Half the fun is driving,” Mark says.
Mark’s goal is always to have the holiday lights on his own property up in time for Thanksgiving, provided the leaves are down. And along with that job, he has to find time to work with the Ivoryton Illuminations volunteers to get the light show ready for its Dec. 3 debut. But he notes there is one advantage that the Illuminations crew has that would not have been possible in holidays long past. Decorators of a certain age can remember the frustration of the tree lights where an outage of one bulb meant the entire string went dark. Now, Mark points out, the light strings use LED rather than incandescent bulbs and one dark light does not doom an entire strand.
Ivoryton Illuminations
Saturday, Dec. 3 from 5 to 8 p.m. The show continues nightly from to Jan. 7, 2017.