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Putting out Christmas decorations and piling into the family car for a tour of other houses' lights are time-honored holiday traditions for many families.
While some homeowners sparingly spruce up their residences with strategically placed strings of lights, there are a few who turn their entire yards into twinkling winter wonderlands. These people go out of their way to create dazzling displays that slow traffic.
One such display can be found at 54 Tree Lane in Colbert. There, amid a sea of colorful lights, passers-by can see a ''Santa Express'' airplane -- complete with landing strip -- and a dragster sleigh.
''Last year, I had a grid (of lights) on the lawn,'' said Jimmy Escoe, the display's creator. ''Everybody joked with me that it looked like an airport, so I figured I'd build an airplane to put out there.''
The ''Santa Express'' airplane is mostly made of plywood and covered with lights. The plane's propeller appears to be in constant motion. Escoe crafted it from a Plexiglas disk. The airplane is mounted on a 10-foot-tall section of a TV antenna tower, poised to land at a ''landing strip'' laid out with red rope lights.
One of Escoe's additions this year depicts Santa Claus' plane making a landing in his yard. What started as a treat for his grandchildren has grown into a community fixture.Jeff Blake/Staff
Not far from the airplane is Escoe's newest creation -- a dragster sleigh pulled by reindeer.
''Drag racing is my favorite sport,'' Escoe explained. ''Everything on that sled was pretty much laying around the shop.''
Escoe built the sleigh's body from plywood and vinyl siding. The engine was constructed with PVC pipes, sections of pool vacuum hoses and illuminated clear plastic storage containers. The sleigh even uses wheels from a grandson's discarded scooter.
The Escoes began decorating their home in October. Since Thanksgiving night, the Escoes have turned on their lights every night. The electric bills were not drastically affected by their creative constructions last year, ''but that was before the rope lights,'' Escoe's wife, Brenda, said. A series of arches supporting clear rope lights line Tree Lane.
Jimmy Escoe said he began decorating his home a few years ago for his grandchildren, who asked him about doing so after seeing decorated houses in movies.
Rosa Anderson uses several lighting designs to decorate her home on Pittard Road off Highway 72. Jeff Blake/Staff
When asked which are their favorite displays, 7-year-old Zach Escoe said he likes the airplane, and his 4-year-old brother, Spencer, said he prefers a gazebo made of lights supported by pipe.
The Escoes' lights expand every year, and Jimmy Escoe said he is not quite finished with this year's display and already has ideas for next year.
''I want to focus on different ways Santa Claus can come to your house,'' he said, sharing his plans for a tugboat, train and even a tractor trailer rig for next year. ''I want to build all kinds of stuff. Everybody else has traditional lighting.''
People don't have to drive all the way to Madison County to see holiday lights, however. There are houses in Athens twinkling with Christmas cheer as well.
Gene and Imogene Bell have decorated their home at 492 Ruth St. for years.
''That's my husband's thing,'' Imogene Bell said. ''He has nativity scenes; he built the stables. He has a lot of deer, Santa Clauses, snowmen -- all kinds of stuff. I don't even know where to begin.''
Bell said that while her husband has decorated their house for years, ''he's really gotten into it the last three years.''
List of lights
Reader nominations for great places to see holiday lights range from in-town Athens to some of the side roads in the region. Here are some suggestions for finding pretty displays:
980 Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway near Ruth Street
492 Ruth St. between Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway and North Avenue
310 Pittard Road between Old Elberton Road (an extension of Spring Valley Road) and Georgia Highway 72
Hallmark mobile home park, Spring Valley Road east of Winterville Road
Peter Street and Moreland Avenue
Hardeman-Sams House, 255 S. Milledge Ave.
595 Fortson Road off West Lake Drive near Milledge Circle
290 Garnett Ridge Drive, near Amethyst Drive. Take Jefferson River Road off Jefferson Road.
Colliers Creek Road in Northwest Woods subdivision, off Mars Hill Road (Georgia Highway 53) west of Butler's Crossing
Simonton Bridge Road between Watkinsville and Athens-Clarke County (same road is named Whitehall Road in Athens-Clarke)
Georgia Highway 15 near Greene County line south of Watkinsville
1437 Virginia Lane off Glenn Carrie Road northwest of Hull
Christmas Circle off U.S. Highway 29 and Moriah Church Road, about six miles northeast of the Athens-Clarke County line and about two miles south of Danielsville city limit
54 Tree Lane, Colbert. From Georgia Highway 72 on west side of Colbert, take North First Street to Peachtree Street to Tree Street. From Christmas Circle, take Moriah Church Road to Diamond Hill-Colbert Road to Peachtree Street.
Slim & Merle Williamson, Georgia Highway 82, Arcade. Go south off U.S. Highway 129 in Arcade.
Gordon Street, Jefferson. Street runs between U.S. Highway 129 on the south side of town to the square downtown.
Like the Escoes, Imogene Bell said the decorations are intended for the enjoyment of their grandchildren, but neighbors and passers-by like them, too.
''People come by and drive really slow,'' she said. ''They'll call us and tell us how nice it is.''
Families looking for something a little different can drive to Garnett Ridge subdivision off Jefferson River Road in Athens to see a religious mural painted by community residents, a local artist and University of Georgia students.
The colorful mural, which covers the entire side of a house at Garnett Ridge and Amethyst drives, features the Virgin of Guadeloupe, the patron saint of Mexico. The residents of 290 Garnett Ridge Drive have surrounded the mural with Christmas lights for nighttime illumination.
Tom Cooper, an associate professor in language education at UGA, said his students came up with the project as part of a course in teaching English as a Second Language. The six students had to find something positive to do for the community which would involve residents.
''The owner of the complex suggested it. We were just going to paint the mailboxes,'' Cooper said.
Melissa Kurtz, a senior from Athens, said the group was asked to paint a mural on a house because of gang-related graffiti at the duplex subdivision. The group thought for a long time about what kind of mural to paint.
One of the students, Ouida Bradford, enlisted the help of Alex Cook, an artist who painted a mural at the Georgia Theatre at East Clayton and North Lumpkin streets. Bradford said the project took two days to complete in November.
''We talked to the woman who lived there for ideas. We were thinking about doing a landscape,'' Kurtz said. ''One day, she came out in her nightgown with a kid on her hip and said, 'La Virgen de Guadeloupe' (the Virgin of Guadeloupe).''
Kurtz said that many residents in the neighborhood identify with the mural of the patron saint, and the project has brought the community together.
''The response has been overwhelmingly positive. They (the residents) all just love it,'' she said.
Residents plan to keep the mural as a permanent fixture, and the people who worked on the project hope to paint more in the future, Kurtz said.
Whether to make grandchildren's Christmas fantasies come true or to delight neighbors, people who go all out with their holiday decorating usually share one thing in common.
''We just love Christmas. We always have,'' Jimmy Escoe said with a grin.
Police reporter Rhiannon Brewer can be reached at email@example.com or (706) 208-2226.
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An exciting new installment in the popular Death on Demand series from multiple award-winner Carolyn Hart.
©2011 Carolyn Hart (P)2011 Random House Audio
Tiger Rose
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Didn't read the book version.
I have listened to 20 of the readings and this one is the best one yet.
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It's far from perfect, but the fashion industry is in a committed relationship with technology. The day-long Decoded Fashion event at Lincoln Center on Monday explored the facets of the fusion of tech and fashion. While the two can get along swimmingly, the fashion industry's understanding of tech is limited, and technology is (currently) unable to fix some of fashion's biggest problems.
Comprised of ten panels with three keynotes (including Tumblr's wunderkind David Karp), the event celebrated technology's role in the fashion industry, though many panels also addressed the myriad problems that fashion faces with its expansion online in the era of social media.
By now, it's a given that fashion has to have a social media presence, but there are five platforms you "can't not do" as a brand, most notably Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, according to tech-savvy fashionistas.
Representatives of different brands differed on which they found to be the most valuable. While many lauded the click-through properties of Twitter, more found that Facebook was the most lucrative for actual sales. In fact, Stylecaster's Ari Goldberg noted that for some brands, Facebook drove three times the traffic of Twitter. Instagram and Tumblr remain virtual lookbooks for brands, and though the designers of the CFDA panel swore the photo app was their favorite, neither has as much success as other social media when it comes to actually pushing product.
All of the designers of the CFDA panel (from Alice+Olivia, kate spade and Nicole Miller) viewed social media as a narrative device, each one a different storefront window to fill up with the right sort of content. While some panels used social media to talk about numbers, designers and creatives viewed it as a tool for spread of their brands over the Internet, or "creating the world of the brand," as Ms. Bendet termed it.
The general consensus of the day was that Pinterest will be the next big social media outlet. Though that may not be breaking news, the fashion industry is coming for the fledgling site. Already, brands like Saks have pinboards which are connected to their main sites.
While the conference celebrated the use of technology in fashion, there was a theme of "technology as obstacle" that pervaded several panels. The Internet creates a gap between retailer and consumer, one which startups, technology and social media are trying to bridge, with varying degrees of success.
The "Investor Reveal" panel staffed by venture capitalists and the session entitled "Consumer-Powered Design" spoke to fashion's problematic relationship with the Internet. Panelists throughout the day implied that there is a misunderstanding by the majority of the fashion industry of how the fashion business translates into e-commerce. Members of some panels went so far as to call the fashion industry "broken."
"Fashion is laggard when it comes to data," said Mr. Goldberg, who asserted that the industry would be transformed once it got its online act together.
Social media was not the only method presented as means for pushing product; there was plenty of tech, including a dazzling video panel. (FYI, interactive video is about to happen in a major way.)
Each panel may have looked at fashion and technology's relationship a different way, but ultimately it is a relationship: both rewarding and frustrating, sometimes successful and occasionally a disaster. Despite the boom of startups and innovative use of social media, it seems that the fashion industry needs to decode technology to succeed.


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What is needed to implement a Web services application?
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Web services, at a minimum, need WSDL for the interface definition, SOAP for communications. You don't need Java, and UDDI only if you need a directory, some place to register and discover WSDL to interact with a remote Web service.
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