Pulling Together At Christmas

One morning in December 2009, Bill McDonald read in the paper that a local man, Joe Day, was sick with small-cell lung cancer. That meant Day couldn’t assemble the magnificently lit, handcrafted Christmas displays that had made his house in Versailles, Indiana, an annual holiday pilgrimage site for as many as 95,000 people. Day had made his own quick decision 33 Christmases ago when he came home one afternoon from his job as an electrician and found his five-year-old grandson, Nicholas, waiting. “What do you want to do today?” Day asked. “Let’s build a reindeer, Papa,” Nicholas said. They fashioned one using wood from a fallen tree, then set it out on the lawn and lit up its cherry-red nose for the holidays. Each year, Day added to his handi-work, placing reindeer on a track above his roof and winding lights as if they were electric vines around his windows and doors. Eventually thousands of lights, figures, mannequins, and models filled his yard and spilled into his sister’s property next door. But not this year until Bill McDonald thought, “It wouldn’t be Christmas without Joe’s lights. Somebody has got to help this guy.” So McDonald called Joe Day and said, “You don’t know me but I want to help you get your lights up.” Through word of mouth, McDonald and his wife, Toni, enlisted the Knights of Columbus, the Masons, the Lions, local firefighters, friends, and strangers to set up Day’s displays. For two days, more than 100 volunteers climbed in and around Day’s house and yard, following his hand-drawn diagrams that showed where everything should go. On the evening of December 12, with crowds of volunteers cheering him on, Day flipped the switch and lit up the spectacle. “This is what the Lord wanted us to do,” says McDonald, “to pull together, and be together, and help one another.”