For the past 20 years at Christmas time, Herbert Honjo of Lihu’e has delighted his family and strangers alike by lighting up his house. A network of Christmas lights — more than 4,000 this year — and fixtures with holiday
For the past 20 years at Christmas time, Herbert Honjo of Lihu’e has delighted his family and strangers alike by lighting up his house.
A network of Christmas lights — more than 4,000 this year — and fixtures with holiday themes are on or around the house at 4264 Hardy St. to usher in “Christmas cheer and joy,” Honjo said.
Some neighbors and passersby have said the light display is so bright that it could be used as a airplane beacon.
“Lights are special to me. I do it for the love of my four grandchildren and everybody else’s children on Kaua’i,” Honjo said. “The kids come by with parents and they are amazed at what they see.”
The light display, which changes every year, meshes with those of neighbors, Norvin Olivas, whose display includes a lighted American flag on his roof this year out of respect for the Sept. 11 terrorism victims, and John Gandeza, creating a “winter wonderland” look for the neighborhood.
Nightly, up to 50 cars with children pull up in front of his home to take in the sight, Honjo said.
Twenty years ago, Honjo put up his first Christmas display with 150 lights. The collection has grown mostly through donations from friends.
Following a 40-year career as a civil service worker on Kaua’i, Honjo recently retired as a supervisor with Hawai’i Air National Guard. With extra time, he began cleaning hundreds of yards of strings of lights two weeks before the Thanksgiving weekend – a task he had to begin in September when he was still working.
Like clockwork, he starts putting up the lights and ornaments around Thanksgiving weekend and gets 90 percent of them arranged by Dec. 1. He takes them down by Jan. 2. In the interim, Honjo replaces burned-out bulbs and adds more lights to round out his creations.
He said he gets immediate feedback from people who patronize A Head of Time, a beauty salon on Rice Street co-owned by his daughter, Mitzi Yamamoto. She relays the messages to Honjo and he tackles “what else has to be done to make it better.”
Honjo and his neighbors leave nothing to chance. Each night they either sit in their yards or plant themselves across the street at Wilcox Elementary School to see what else they can do to improve their light displays.
“Lights bring peace and a sense of happiness,” said Honjo, who raises tropical fish in tanks in his garage and gazes at them for the same meditative purpose.
Honjo lays out the lights differently each year to be creative. This year, he placed a Santa Claus and a reindeer fixture – one of the key pieces of his collection — on a tree. Last year, the same figures were suspended above the yard. In other years, the fixtures sat on the ground.
Lights also adorn a front yard fence, on which is attached a single America flag to remember the Sept. 11 victms.
The extra $30 on his electricity bill to power the lights doesn’t deter him from installing more lights, he said, “because it is really worth it.”
If somebody asked him whether he would sell the light collection, he would probably say no.
“The lights are priceless because they bring joy to everyone,” he said. “They bring out the best in people.”
Staff writer Lester Chang can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 225) and mailto:lchang@pulitzer.net
