Who won the 2022 CharlotteFive annual Readers’ Choice Awards for Best Christmas lights?
Every year, CharlotteFive asks you to send us your favorite homes decked out with Christmas lights in the Charlotte area. And every year, you come through with nominations of homes that enough holiday cheer they can be seen from space!
We then ask you to do the near-impossible: Vote for the best one.
All of the homes are our favorites, and they are all winners in our book. Make sure you check out the list of all 19 you sent us this year, but first, here’s more about the winner and runner-up:
Winner: 1007 Mapesbury Lane, Waxhaw
Neighborhood: Kingsmead
Mark Montgomery starts decorating his home each year the weekend before Halloween. He works on it every weekend and a couple of hours a night during the week to get it ready by Thanksgiving night. He has the help of his immediate family and his father, who comes to help throughout.
“It’s been a great bonding experience for us over the years, getting to do this.”
Montgomery started by adding lights every year, and a few years into it, he was stopped one night by someone who said: “’I don’t know if you see the black SUV that drives by every night, but there’s a little boy with cancer (in it), and your lights are the only things making him happy right now.’
“And I realized that a simple thing like Christmas lights can really boost people’s spirits. So I just kept adding every single year — and now we have this. And I found that every single year I get stories like that, where it’s just impacted somebody in ways that I didn’t realize, and it’s been really positive.”
WHAT TO KNOW: Bring your canned goods when you visit the Mapesbury Lane decorations — the Montgomery family is collecting them for donation.
Last year, the family collected over 1,000 cans. This season, their goal is to get over 1,500.
Runner-up: 101 Wilhelmina Avenue, Charlotte
Neighborhood: Plaza Midwood
Molly Carroll’s holiday decorating adventure began one drunken evening in 2010, after her husband and his friends decided to “go Griswold” on their homes. “And my husband took that a little too seriously.”
The family started with four inflatables and some lights, and the other guys gave up, Carroll said. Then on Dec. 26, her husband woke his daughters up early to go scavenge the sales at Lowe’s, Garden Ridge, Home Goods, etc. for inflatables on sale. The next year, the family had 10 inflatables. The year after, 20. Now — 112. “We just thought it would be fun and silly — and again, my husband is very competitive.”
The day after Christmas inflatables shopping became a tradition. The kids are in college now, so Molly and some neighbors now go along for the shopping excursion each year. “We keep saying we’re going to stop, but when the neighbors walk by and tell us how much they love it, we can’t stop.”
This story was originally published December 16, 2022 at 12:53 PM.