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Darrel and Treacy Eros at their Woolgar Avenue home - Katherine Hudson/NNSL photo

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Treacy Eros sits in her back porch at night and smiles as she sees cars slow down outside her house, sometimes idling for a full five minutes. She has seen children cry as parents attempt to drag them away from the colourful lights and waving figurines.

Signs hang in the house's front windows, welcoming motorists to tune their radio to 107.1 FM from 7 to 10 p.m. every night from Dec. 1 to Jan. 1. The music - 62 Christmas songs - is accompanied to the note by 32 sets of twinkling lights that decorate the Eros's house and front yard.

Treacy and her husband Darrel have lived in Yellowknife for the past 21 years and started seriously decorating their property over the past seven Christmas seasons. The couple's first date was a tour of the Christmas lights of the city - a twinkle tour, said Treacy. Now on Woolgar Avenue, the tour comes to them.

"We went around the city and I noticed not many people decorated in this town," said Treacy.

As a joke, Darrel showed his wife a video of a house with Christmas lights in sync to Wizards in Winter by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Treacy took the video as a challenge, and sent Darrel an e-mail containing links to about 20 websites that could make their house a traffic-stopper as well.

"We found the stuff and we just went to town," said Darrel.

The couple purchased the equipment from a company titled Animated Lighting - where starter kits with a programmer and songs starts at around $500.

Darrel, a maintenance technologist at a radio station in town, finds hooking up the lights to sync with a radio transmitter right up his alley.

"I just tuned it to a frequency no one in town was anywhere near, set it to what I know to be the legal limit of two-watts output power, got me an antennae for the frequency and there you go," said Darrel.

The music travels a fair distance, with the signal crackling around Forrest Drive and the corner of Borden Drive and Magrum Crescent near Old Airport Road.

"We usually add at least one piece every year," she said. "We also have a lot in storage. We try to mix it up every year."

Treacy said the city's Christmas lights have improved from seven years ago, with a lot more people "lighting up." She maintains LED lights might have something to do with the added incentive - saying although they might cost a bit more than older lights, the power bill is much less.

"We enjoy doing it. We love everybody's feedback on it, people stopping and taking pictures, honking their horns," she said.

"Everybody loves it and it makes everybody smile and this is why we do it. We get a kick out of the kids talking about it and people slamming on their breaks."

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