Merry Christmas, America: Megawatt Displays Across the U.S.A. »

Bruce Littlefield is a New York-based designer, writer, and restaurateur. Hailed as a "design and lifestyle guru" by Publisher's Weekly, he is the author of the recently published Garage Sale America and Airstream Living, and co-writer of the best-selling Use What You've Got and Other Business Lessons I learned from My Mom with real-estate magnate Barbara Corcoran. Originally from the south, decorating for Christmas is as natural as breathing to Bruce, and each December finds him attempting over-the-top mischief. His personal collection of Christmas treasures can be found displayed proudly every hol iday season in a 1940s Catskills' farmhouse, which he renovated and decorated himself.

Every town has that house that outdoes itself at Christmas. Legendary for miles around, it is the place to see dazzling holiday decorating of the eye-popping, traffic-stopping sort. This flickering showcase bedecked with tens of thousands of lights is hard to resist—and ignore—as often every square inch is caked in Christmas, from snowmen to elves, carousels to candy canes. But who lives in that house—and houses like it around the country? And what compels this Christmas-decorating fervor?

Author Bruce Littlefield finds the answers on his quest to locate the most spectacular Christmas displays across America. His adventures take him to the front lawns and doors of people in cities and towns from coast to coast who have a flair and fanaticism for doing Christmas right—whose goal is giving the world an illuminated, inflated, decorated gift. Littlefield shares his firsthand encounters with people for whom Christmas is a year-round labor of love—the people who spend mind-boggling amounts of time and money transforming their houses and yards, and even those of the neighbors, into unique Christmas fantasylands that are spectacles of individual expression and must-see destinations for the rest of us.

These portraits of Christmas range from tacky to refined, outlandish to poignant—and the reasons they are created vary, too—but all are dazzling in their own ways, and the passionate people who dream them up have entertaining stories and anecdotes to tell that will make this Christmas the brightest, merriest, happiest Christmas ever. Just follow the lights.