The Burkman Holiday Home — embellished by dazzling lights and other holiday decorations — sets a scene so magnificent, you’d think it came straight from a showing of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
With ornaments covering nearly every inch of the home’s exterior, front porch and yard, Jen, Corey, Alex and Jack Burkman — occasionally seen with Jen’s dad, Gene Skalskyj, who travels from Michigan to make an appearance as Santa — are undeniably Frisco’s real-life Griswolds.
Each Halloween and Christmas, the family pours its love into decorating for the holiday season. Its Christmas display has grown to more than 70,000 lights and 200 lawn ornaments. Through the front windows, visitors can see a vibrant interior to match the street view of the home. Mother and wife Jen said she decorates about 20 Christmas trees for the home’s indoors.
Last year, ABC’s Great Christmas Light Fight reality show filmed the spectacle for the upcoming season, which will air in a few weeks. Days earlier, the Burkmans made their national TV debut on the Live With Kelly and Ryan talk show.
Unfortunately, that Christmas-focused filming clashed with the Burkmans’ Halloween schedule, so this year they’ve returned to make the spooky season bigger and better than ever before.
Jen Burkman said they began building sets to prepare for Halloween during the summer.
“This year, actually, some neighborhood kids wanted to help,” she said.
When her boys were younger, she celebrated Halloween with whimsical, Disney-like decorations, but once they hit middle school, she knew she needed to abandon the “cutesy” decorations and make a full-force switch to horror and gore.
Now the lawn of the Holiday Home is covered with ghouls, pumpkins, headstones, spiders and snakes. Two 20-foot-tall animatronic skeletons look down at visitors, and fog pours of out of the giant witches’ cauldron. Green and purple lights shine across the display, and dark music plays in the background. Indoors, bright green lights shine out into the street.
As expected for such an elaborate celebration, Burkman said the family has also begun preparing for Christmas — hot-gluing strands of lights to the side of their home.
“If I don’t start in October, I won’t be ready to go the weekend after Thanksgiving,” she said. “I always tell people it’s the nightmare before Christmas — where Christmas and Halloween meet.”
“My neighbors start laughing by the time Halloween quits, because they know as soon as Halloween comes — like, as soon as that last trick-or-treater leaves — we are pulling Halloween decorations off the grass because Nov. 1, it is pedal-to-the-metal for our Christmas display,” she added.
The Burkman family tradition began decades ago when they learned that their 2-year-old, Alex — the first of two sons on the autism spectrum — loved Christmas decorations and bright lights.
Similar to the cross-street neighbors in the live-action film adaptation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Burkman said they compete with neighbors on who can decorate the best.
“We just all really like to push each other,” she said.
The Burkmans’ Holiday Home is now a destination spot where they get to peek into others’ lives and celebrate life, Burkman said, with families meeting up, couples becoming engaged, first-time parents bringing their newborns.
To visit or donate
The Burkman Holiday Home of Frisco is at 3809 Hazelhurst Dr. in Frisco.
For more information, visit Burkman Holiday Home of Frisco on Facebook.
Donations for families with members who have special needs may be made in person or through the Venmo account @burkmanholidayhome.
