SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
A Yellowknife family had their home and Christmas spirit assaulted this week when vandals wrecked a Christmas display they had worked tirelessly to build.

Six-year-old Alexander Dunlop, Karen Dunlop, and Austyn Dunlop, 4, stand outside their home on Williams Avenue by the place their light-up Christmas tree once stood. The tree was stolen sometime early Monday morning, much to the dismay of the family. - Candace Thomson/NNSL photo

Brian and Karen Dunlop left their home on Monday morning to find that their light-up Christmas tree with its massive green and red ribbon on the front lawn was nowhere to be seen. It had been ripped from the ground in an act of vandalism.

Much of the display, that took the family 15 to 20 hours over three weeks to set up, was strewn across the lawn. The extension cord was thrown halfway across the lawn and was surrounded by broken ornaments. Two pairs of footprints in the snow led away from the scene.

Alexander Dunlop, six, and his sister Austyn Dunlop, four, immediately broke down crying in shock and anger.

"Somebody stole my tree! Why would they be so mean?" the children cried, as their parents stood dumbstruck.

"The kids are upset and they don't understand. You can't explain why somebody just does something random and mean," Karen Dunlop told Yellowknifer.

"This is the first year we've done lights that they're old enough to remember, and all they're going to remember is that someone stole their Christmas tree," she added. "It's always going to be that and now they're going to be worried that someone's going to take it from them every year."

The family lives on the well-lit and populated Williams Avenue, and had decorated the house both to enter the Christmas Lights competition put on by the City of Yellowknife and Northwestel, and to show off for family coming to visit for the holidays.

Dunlop said she contacted the organizers of the competition and sent them photos of the scene she'd taken with her cellphone before it had been vandalized. The family is hoping the photos will be enough for the competition, and they will still enter it with the display they've moved to the backyard.

"The kids wanted to enter the Christmas competition, because in 2008 we won the competition but they were too young to remember it, so we said we'd enter it again," she said. "The reason the city promotes it is to liven up the community and to make it a little brighter. It's an initiative to have people put up Christmas lights and who's going to put them out when they're stolen off your front yard?"

She and her husband had finished the setup Sunday night and joked that evening about the impossibility of someone stealing the lights. They laughed it off, not thinking that anyone could really sink so low for that to happen.

"I mean, who steals Christmas lights?" she said incredulously. "You don't just spend hours doing this, you also brainstorm it and go to the store and purchase things that fit where you want them to fit. You have a vision and you make it happen, you have to think it through."

Now, she's had to move all of the ornaments that can't fit or be nailed down to the front porch in the backyard instead. People driving by can still see, but it won't be the same effect.

Dunlop said she hopes the family will still place in the competition, but the entire ordeal has soured the Christmas spirit and left the family hurt. She said she now wonders whether other typical lawn items such as furniture, toys and even plants are safe.

"I'm disgusted, my trust in people is just gone. I mean, when you have to get jaded against society at Christmas, that's a really sad day," she said.

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