50,000 lights: Lewes home puts on animated Christmas show

Marc-Anthony Worosilo never had Christmas lights at the six-family tenement he grew up in during the '60s, so his father would trek him over to New York City's glitzed-out department stores.

As a kid, Worosilo stared in awe at the towering trees and intricate window displays at Macy's and Gimbels. But the lights that slithered up city buildings and sculpted Christmas icons gripped his soul the most. 

"If you get a house one day, you'll be able to put up lights," his father told him.

Decades later, it is hard to miss Worosilo's Lewes home during the holidays. From 5-11 p.m. every night through New Year's Day, he and husband Tom Negran rev up an animated light show that could rival the legendary Apple Electric installation.

They've put on the show for the last five years, and with each season comes new structures, some of them built by Negran's hand.

"He's the inspiration. I'm the perspiration," Negran joked of his husband. A team of "Santa helpers" assists Negran and Worosilo with setting up their radiant creations. 

Giant snowflakes, nutcrackers, window displays worthy of Macy's and a Nativity scene are a fraction of what curious passersby and Christmas light aficionados will find at the corner of Sandstone Drive and Seashore Drive in Henlopen Landing. 

It's the one time of year when strangers are encouraged to park in front of the couple's house at night and stay a while. 

"We're happy to share the experience of Christmas with everyone," Worosilo said. "It's all about celebrating the community."

A woman told Worosilo this was her third year taking her kids to see "the Christmas house."

"They fall asleep," she told him. "It's magic." 

The couple said the show costs them $75 to $100 on their electricity bill. The LED lights help keep the cost relatively low, even with 50,000 bulbs. Every year, they go to a light expo "where crazy people like us get together and find out what technology is new," Worosilo said, laughing. 

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It is an obvious passion of Worosilo's, stemming from his childhood, when he helped his uncle put up lights, when his father told him that one day, he could have his own light show.

Now, what he loves streams into the eyes of wonder-struck kids and adults pulling up to the house, tuning into 90.1 and watching as the light displays dance to Christmas songs. 

At that tenement in New Jersey, just south of all the pretty lights New York City had to offer, Worosilo's uncle once asked his dad what his nephew wanted for Christmas.

"Get him some Christmas lights," he remembers his dad saying. "He'll play with them all day."

"He'll play with them for the rest of his life," Negran added wryly.