WARSAW – Audie Williams opens the door of his ordinary house in an ordinary subdivision, wearing a red pullover and graying whiskers.
He looks … vaguely familiar.
“Hi, I’m Kris Kringle,” he said.
Riiiiiiight.
It helps to have a portrait of the artist as a young man to understand a portrait of the artist as a somewhat older, jolly man-in-red. Christmas was always a special time for his family during his youth in Missouri, he said.
“My mother was a very big Christmas fan, which is where all this kind of started,” he said. “She went all out.”
He’ll say he eventually outgrew his mother’s decorating passion – and he’s not kidding.
Audie and Nancy Williams have more than 40 artificial Christmas trees displayed in their Warsaw home this year, a collection that grows with each passing year.
If behind every great Santa is a Mrs. Claus, at the Williams home, it’s Nancy.
Soft-spoken Nancy, 47, is the mastermind behind the decorating of the trees, dreaming up themes as traditional as “poinsettias” and as unusual as “birds and bees.”
Not surprisingly, the memories she has of her childhood Christmases in Texas are of the cedar and pine trees around which her holidays centered.
“We would always go out to that land every year, and we would cut our own tree,” she said. “Sometimes a couple.”
Never 40 trees, but every hobby has to start somewhere. For Audie and Nancy Williams, it began when they moved to Indiana from Texas more than a decade ago.
The tree in their front room is the first one they put up after the move, and they’ve been building upon it for those 11 years.
“This is probably by far, our favorite,” said Audie, 45. “It’s come a long way.”
The “gold tree” has more than 5,000 lights and who knows how many ornaments, all centered on a theme of gold and crystals.
Five-thousand lights? Well, that’s a lot, but not too crazy.
Or maybe the Williamses are just easing you in.
In the adjoining dining room, trees stand in the four corners and one more is on the table, each with different themes. In one corner, a tree is decorated in shades of pink and mauve; in another, a wine-themed tree bears tiny clusters of grapes and a merlot-hued swath of fabric at its base.
The couple give informal names to areas of the house. A grouping of snowmen under a table is Snowman Alley; a line of smaller trees in a hallway are Antique Row.
Those trees, decorated with ornaments from the couple’s childhood, have special meaning for the Williams family. Crocheted snowflakes are interspersed with plastic globe ornaments.
More trees line the stairway, sit on the landing and decorate the sunroom and even bathrooms.
Part of the joy of Christmas to this family is sharing their over-the-top decorations with friends by holding open houses for both Audie and Nancy’s work colleagues and for the neighborhood.
They hide tiny blown-glass pickle ornaments and invite the children in attendance to search their trees to find those ornaments and earn a prize.
And there are plenty of opportunities to hide them. Upstairs are more trees, in every bedroom and a home office, where a wreath even hangs from a ceiling fan. Tiny trees are in the bathrooms.
From the most elaborate, the giant gold tree, to the least, a Charlie Brown Christmas tree with a single ornament, most have a name and a theme.
So where do two working adults with two grown children find the time to decorate so much?
They start putting up trees around Labor Day, which makes the real trees of Nancy’s childhood impractical. And they start planning for next year’s holiday long, long before that.
“We start doing ‘Christmas’ on Dec. 26,” Audie Williams said.
And Christmas shopping? Nancy does most of it online. On Christmas morning, just about every tree will have one or two packages – which, with so many trees, tends to lead to a “now-where-did-I-put-that” hunt on Christmas morning.
Overall, the Williamses are extremely organized with their collection – by necessity. The attic that runs the length of the house is chock-full of decorations during the offseason, with separate boxes devoted to each tree, its lights and its ornaments.
More decorations and larger trees are stored outside in a shed. Audie admits it’s getting to the point that they’re almost running out of room.
Then there’s the room that never gets undecorated.
“Nancy actually calls this therapy for me,” Audie said, swinging open the door to a small second-floor room – a home office or guest room in someone else’s house, perhaps, but a year-round Christmas wonderland at the Williams’ home.
A hand-carved and -painted foam backdrop creates a multilayered winter landscape for Audie’s collection of 150 Victorian village pieces, which he has been collecting since his early 20s.
A running waterfall and a turning windmill make quiet noise. There’s a wine and cheese shop, a tailor, a baker carrying rolls, ballroom dancers. In the second story of one house, Ebenezer Scrooge is chased around by Christmas ghosts.
Williams created a giant mountain in the corner using seven cans of spray foam. The entire village is wired so he can flip a few switches and light it up at once.
When it became too time-consuming to pack and unpack the scene every year, Williams decided to leave it up. Any day of the year can find him in the village room, tinkering with the train that runs the perimeter or rearranging figurines.
The convenience of it has left him more time to pursue his new passion – animated outdoor decorations. After realizing how expensive it can be to buy pre-programmed equipment that animates outdoor lights and puts them to music, Audie decided to create his own control boxes.
“There was quite a learning curve,” he said.
Now, 30,000 outdoor lights dance to holiday tunes on cue, causing a neighbor to joke he would just put up an arrow pointing to the Williams’ house and a sign simply reading “Ditto.”
