Extreme holiday decorating is focus of ABC’s Great Christmas Light Fight

It’s a holiday showdown as extreme holiday decorating is the focus of ABC’s The Great Christmas Light Fight, a new competition series beginning Monday, Dec. 9 at 9pmET. Never have cameras captured the intense planning, drive and pure spectacle of “extreme” holiday decorating like this. We’re talking about those festive individuals — those beacons of holiday spirit — who put a whole new meaning to Christmas decorating by adorning just about anything and everything with lights and holiday trimmings.

ABC has found 20 of America’s most enthused home decorators and will pit them against each other in the new, short-run competition series The Great Christmas Light Fight. Every episode will feature four families battling to win $50,000, but in this battle they never get to meet their competition.

“They don’t know who the other three families are that they are competing against, so they are competing somewhat on their own — to do the best they can,” says Brady Connell, one of the show’s executive producers. The families come from all over the country, too, from California to New York, plus Texas, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Virginia, Florida, New York and more.

Judging their work will be either Michael Moloney, from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, or Sabrina Soto, from HGTV, who evaluate homes on design, use of lights and overall Christmas spirit. One judge will travel to all four homes in a particular episode and conduct their evaluation, then return to the winner’s home to award them with their $50,000 prize.

One thing Connell observed in the variances of techniques is in the use of lights. “The number of lights is really interesting to keep an eye on,” he says. “Some houses use maybe 10- or 20,000 lights and there a couple of houses that have over 200,000 lights, but it’s really about how the lights are used opposed to the number. The home with 200,000 lights in Palm Springs is very dense, so every inch of the house and palm trees is completely covered. Then there was one display that is really spread out in Canon, Ga., that’s over a three-acre piece of land and that becomes part of the experience.

“The only common theme I can see so far is that they are all doing this for good reasons — the reason of the season kind of thing,” Connell says. “It all comes from the heart.”

The Great Christmas Light Fight airs on ABC Monday, Dec. 9, 16 and 23 at 9pm ET.

Think your house has them beat? Tell us your story below. Who knows … you may be considered for next year’s competition!