A ‘Grinch’ cut this Bluffton man’s Christmas lights. So, he fixed them ... then hung more
Every year since moving into Bluffton’s Lawton Station neighborhood in 2007, Marlen Messer has decorated his house with Christmas lights.
The display has grown tremendously in those 13 years, including the addition of music and animation, but Messer has never counted the lights “because it’s just so many of them,” he said.
This year, he bought eight more rolls of lights, each with 500 bulbs.
“I have more lights than I know what to do with right now, and I’m not the get-up-on-the-roof kind of guy,” he laughed. Instead, he placed them in neat rows along his lawn and set them to twinkle. The effort takes about 16 hours over a few days.
Neighbors know to expect the house on Weston Court to light up from Thanksgiving night through the start of the New Year, and most of them — especially the children — look forward to it.
But late last week, after Messer came home from his job on Hilton Head Island and started turning on the lights before eating dinner, as he does every night, he noticed a row had been cut.
“Looks like the Grinch is at it again this year,” Messer posted on Nextdoor, a social network website organized by neighborhood.
It was the second consecutive year this happened.
Some neighbors suggested animals may have chewed through the wires, but Messer said the lines were too smoothly cut.
“I know what it looks like when a pair of scissors or pocket knife cut the wire,” he said.
Messer, a property manager who often does repairs around his own house, easily spliced the string lights back together, but decided to do one more thing.
“The extra lights I bought weren’t put out yet, so I was like, ‘You don’t like my lights? Well, let’s put out some more,’” he said. “At the end of the day, I do it to make people happy.”
Messer said he started the Christmas-decorating tradition because he always enjoyed doing it with his family when he was growing up in Indiana. But he noticed it turned into something he could do to make other people happy.
That’s not so surprising coming from a guy with a big smile — and a bright blue beard. He dyed his beard as part of a Halloween costume four years ago but didn’t wash it out. Now, he said, it’s “a great way to break the ice and chat with people.”
He said his light display gets compliments from lots of people every year. One family brings their son and daughter by on their golf cart a few nights a week. Another told him their two boys look at the lights through their window each night before bed.
“I remember my childhood growing up without much, so for us to have two or three strings of lights was a big deal, and now that I’m able to make people smile, it’s 100% worth the effort,” Messer said.
“This year has been really rough for a lot of people, and I thought it was really important to bring something special to the table and end the year on a better note than it started.”
