ROSE HILL — In “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” movie, nobody loves Christmas more than Clark Griswold. When he throws the switch on his gleefully over-decorated house, it fries the city’s electric grid.
In Rose Hill, Kansas, nobody loves Christmas more than Michael Russell. He calls his place The Griswold House of Rose Hill. But that undersells it. Because Russell’s house transformation actually surpasses the house of Chevy Chase’s character in the 1989 movie.
Russell’s display is an eye-popping, jaw-dropping, brain-melting extravaganza of lights and wonder. It covers every square foot of his front yard, every inch of his house, his entire roof and now all of his backyard, too.
He hasn’t blown the town’s electric grid yet.
But every year, he finds a way to dial up the wattage from the year before. This year, he’s added Clark Griswold’s station wagon, a 20-foot elf, the leg lamp from “A Christmas Story,” a bunch of other large inflatables, a candy cane arch over the front yard pathway and more lights than ever before. The total is now somewhere around 120,000, but he’s lost count.
“I never intended to go this big,” Russell said. “I moved here to Rose Hill from Ark City in 2004 to be closer to work, and I started off with a few lights and a couple of inflatables. But I’ve always been the type of person to do things in excess. So my display kept growing. And now, to have it ready by Thanksgiving, I have to start working on it in August.”
Christmas of 2020 was when the number of visitors exploded. Russell had been offering a free candy cane to everyone who stopped to see the display, and 20 or 30 boxes of candy had always been enough. But in 2020, he went through 500 boxes of the red and white canes.
“People had been cooped up because of Covid and just wanted to get out. Some of them told me they’d had a pretty rough year and that seeing my display made them feel a little better. So each year now, I look for ways to make the display even bigger and even better.”
Russell also found a way to make it even taller. After the trees in his front yard had grown too large for him to string lights into the upper branches, a friend showed up with a cherry picker. Now, the holiday glow stretches all the way to the very tops of the trees. As it happens, Russell has no fear of working that far above the ground.
“My display includes a biplane, a helicopter and a hot air balloon, because I’ve jumped out of all three,” he says. Yes, he’s also an experienced skydiver. Russell’s a grandfather now, but he’s still jumping. So it’s no accident that his Christmas display also includes a skydiving Santa. You’ll have to look for it because The Griswold House of Rose Hill is a visual blizzard of Santas, snowmen, gingerbread men, polar bears, elves and more. And in keeping with its name, an inflatable Clark Griswold stands in the corner of the yard to greet visitors.
“One family from Wisconsin was on their way to Arizona for Christmas, road-tripping like the Griswolds. But they heard about my display and drove an hour and a half out of their way to come here and see it,” Russell recalls. “They said it was totally worth the detour.”
It’s also totally worth your short trip to Russell’s house at 1610 Tanglewood Road in Rose Hill. He spends his days in his FedEx truck, helping Santa with deliveries, but he spends his evenings outside, near the fire pit on his driveway.
“Talking to visitors is my favorite part of the entire thing,” he says. “I really enjoy seeing the smiles on their faces. Doing this brings back some of the Christmas magic I always felt when I was a kid.”
Joe Norris is a retired Wichita marketing executive. He can be reached at joe.norris47@gmail.com.
