Keeping the mess in Christmas

WASHINGTON — The white icicle lights came first, delicate and twinkly on her garden apartment balcony. They were so pretty, she bought more. The icicles turned into manic sheets of brilliance, like after an avalanche. Then came the colors: blues, pinks, purples, greens. Then the computerized LED lights. Then the fiber-optic Christmas tree with the stuffed tarantula on top. Then the glowing pink palm tree.

Llori Stein couldn't stop.

Stein's Christmas balcony disaster — her words — is now so ugly, in fact, that the Falls Church, Va., deck appears on the Web site uglychristmaslights.com, which documents people who "have no sense of decency in how they choose to celebrate." And it's featured in the latest planetchristmas.com book, which bills itself as "a delight for all connoisseurs of bad taste."

"It's not hard to create an ugly display. All you have to do is get carried away," Stein, 36, says proudly. "I look like Christmas regurgitated all over my balcony."

What else would you expect from a legally blind underground artist with tattoos of her husband on her arm, a dragon on her bosom and a peacock on her rear end who once ran a, uh, "literary" magazine called Wormfeast?

"There are very few displays that look that good. And if they look that good, it's kinda boring," she says. "When I see Christmas lights, I want to laugh."

Now if only she could cram an outdoor grill on her 12-square-foot balcony along with the rest of the mess and cook up hot dogs and hamburgers. "I'd love to be out there and say to everybody who comes by: 'Have a free hot dog. Here, catch.' "

It's the kind of out-there Snoopy's doghouse Christmas concoction that could send Martha Stewart and her understated garlands right over the edge.

Once she got started last year, the urge to decorate overtook her. "I wouldn't call it an obsession. Maybe an affliction." She finds herself reading the personal blogs of the similarly possessed — even people who confess of marriages falling apart because they couldn't help themselves with the Christmas lights. In that department, so far, she's safe. Her husband, Gregory Bryant, another artist who works at the National Air and Space Museum to pay the bills, loves it — especially her idea of mixing lights and sound.

"I think it's wonderful," Bryant, 52, says as he squeezes between the mix of real and fake plants, waterfalls, hanging beads and strings of lights that crowd the small apartment, awaiting their moment in the spotlight. He launches into a discussion of the Dadaists and synesthesia, or art that mixes the senses, like tasting color.

"They were talking about that in the '20s," he says. "It's exciting to see that happening now and that Llori's a part of that."

Stein nods solemnly. "Yeah, like for me, when there's too much noise, it tastes like battery acid."

Matt Phillips, aka Santa, runs the uglychristmaslights.com Web site. Most of the photos on the site — tangled displays of Christmas lights; blinding rows of inflatable snowmen, Santas, nutcrackers, toy soldiers, SpongeBobs and Scooby-Doos all lined up; neon juggling monkeys; armies of elves and grazing reindeer — are taken by anonymous guerrilla photographers out on the prowl for Christmas on steroids.

"Some of these things, you just have to wonder what people are thinking," Phillips said.

But Stein submitted her own photo — she even posed in the Christmas jacket she made by poking blue LED lights through the sleeves of a black jacket. (Her cane, with gold tinsel and colored lights snaking up its length, was out of sight.)

Rose Reed, who has managed and lived at Lee Square Apartments for nearly 20 years, said she's never seen anything quite like Stein's balcony. Only one person's ever complained that it looks tacky. "Most people are anxious to see what she'll do next," Reed said.

Stein's reasons for creating what she calls her own Christmas horror are fairly simple. It's fun. And growing up, back in the days of big, fat, colored Christmas lights, stringy tinsel and plastic Santas, her grandmother and everyone on their street used to joyfully and garishly light up the neighborhood. She misses that.

But mainly, when she lost the ability to see, brought on by a stroke and malignant hypertension, Christmas lights became the only hedge against darkness. "The illumination is really about the only thing I can see anymore."

So let Llori Stein, the underground artist who believes that anything and everything is art, dream a perfect Christmas dream. In her mind, she sees a nice little house with rolling hills and trees around it. She'd have synthetic Christmas trees in every room. And outside, a gigantic purple Christmas tree. And a kind of magic wonderland in the yard with tons of lights that would look like little UFO eggs.

"I'd definitely go overboard," she says, her voice faraway in a private Christmas paradise. "I'm sure it would definitely be ugly."