The Grinch who stole Christmas made a nasty stop in Sundre last Thursday evening.
Holiday season lights worth a total of $150 were stolen from the front of the home of Kaylin and James Davidson. They are known in their 5 Ave. N.E. neighbourhood as “the Griswolds”.
For the past six years they have lit their home with thousands of Christmas lights. This year the house has at least 10,000 lights.
“We were grumpy because it's our one thing a year we do for the community and all of the kids,” said Kaylin, adding she felt “instant anger” over the theft.
She said she first noticed the lights were missing Friday morning when a big part of the display failed to light up.
“We thought at first they had unplugged them to play a joke or whatever but they unplugged them and took them and ran off with them. We weren't too impressed,” said Davidson.
She said the cost to replace the lights was small compared to the cost of their display, which is more than $3,000.
“It's just the fact that somebody took them to wreck the display that made us angry.”
Kaylin said this is the first time anything like this has happened.
She said they originally began to build their display with incandescent lights but have now completely switched over to LED lights.
Davidson said if the thief or thieves had asked her for lights, she would have “gladly handed them over”, due to their extra incandescent light collection.
“It was a jab to the heart because we worked so hard on it.”
With an addition of about 2,000 lights to this year's display, Davidson and her husband James took five days to set it up, making for their biggest display yet.
She said they had intentions of providing a Santa's Anonymous drop box outside where people could leave cash and donations for the program, due to the high traffic of people viewing their home.
“With people monkeying around with the lights I'm kind of a little leery on leaving a box outside,” said Davidson.
She said they constantly receive phone calls, text messages, and people knocking on their door complimenting their light display. Some nights, vehicles park outside for 10 minutes, she added.
Kaylin said her four children, Zoe, 8, Raelyn, 6, Lilly, 3 and Hudson who is almost one, take pride in their representation of “the Griswolds” and they regularly receive compliments from other kids at school.
She said there are 31 strands of lights (70 lights at $35 per strand) just on the tree in their front yard alone.
“When we bought this house the previous owners always had the largest display in town, so we actually wrote the Christmas lights into our mortgage deal so that we could use some of their lights and carry on their tradition,” said Davidson.
She said police have been notified of this theft.
Sundre RCMP were not available to comment, but Cpl. Darrin Turnbull, of the K-Division South media relations office, confirmed the RCMP has received a complaint of theft of Christmas lights from the Sundre home.
“It appears to be an isolated incident,” said Turnbull.
He said officers are asking if anybody has any information to contact Sundre RCMP at 403-638-3675 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
