HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Mike and Sandra Grogg have been putting up Christmas lights at their house since they moved to Nashville in 1998.
"A couple of years ago, we had a young lady stop and she had her young children. She said, 'My parents brought me here every year, so now I'm bringing my children here every year,' ... Talk about making you feel old!" Sandra laughed.
It's been 25 years, and for the last eight or ten they decided to step it up to the next level. Now, they have snowflakes, Christmas trees, Santa's sleigh and reindeer, snowmen, polar bears and more, all set to light up in sync to the different tunes they play on radio wave 101.7.
Mike is an electrical engineer — the genius behind the intricacies of the lights display. It took him six days to set up all the lights, and tedious amounts of work to program them to the musical Christmas classics. Five minutes of programming, then checking your work, then five more minutes of programming, and so on, he said.
"This year was bad because when he put the controllers up last year, they were..."
"Some of them were still wet," Sandra and Mike said, chuckling to one another.
"Wetter than what he thought when he put them up," Sandra finished.
"I just had to rebuild a bunch of them before I put them out again," Mike said.
Every year, they say they have some sort of challenge to conquer, but it's always worth it. They have so many beautiful stories to tell thanks to their growing lights display.
Mike told the story of one time during COVID-19, when Mr. and Mrs. Claus made an appearance from a distance, another tradition Mike and Sandra always uphold.
"We had a van pull in with a special needs child in the back. He saw us and he started saying 'Ho ho, ho ho, ho ho!' and they explained to us, 'He just loves Santa Claus, and we haven't been able to take him anywhere this year because of COVID. You're the first Santa Claus he's gotten to see. This absolutely makes his holiday'."
Sandra and Mike don't have any children, but that doesn't stop them from creating child-like wonder in their lights display.
"I'm the biggest child there is," Mike shared with a smile.
The panel in their front of the yard reads:
Our Christmas gift to you, from Lights on Luna.
"For the young and the young at heart"
Merry Christmas!
"We tell everybody this is our gift to our neighborhood, to our friends and family, and it's for the young and the young at heart," Mike said.
"People have offered to give use money, and it's like 'no, if you want to give anybody any money, take it to the humane society.' We don't take money for this, this is just having fun!" Sandra said.
"We do it strictly for the joy of the season," Mike agreed.
If you want to see Lights on Luna, you can check Sandra and Mike's Facebook page.
