Holiday lights tour

If you haven’t yet taken a photo to use as a holiday card, grab your cell phone and head to Creek Wood. There you will find an elegant house tastefully lit, looking like it could grace the cover of Southern Living magazine.

We didn’t write down addresses during our holiday lights tour this year, but here’s how you find the camera-ready home. From Whitfield Road, turn north onto Creek Wood Drive. Continue until you see a house on the left festooned with plenty of colored lights. Stop the car and look to your right. Set far back from the road is a house that you’d love for people at your class reunion to think you lived in.

After you’ve taken your pictures, go back out to Whitfield Road and turn left, then make a right on Sunrise. As you head south (you’ll need to make a right at the only stop sign you’ll encounter on Sunrise to continue toward Weaver Dairy Road), you’ll pass a holiday lights display that comes out of nowhere, replete with a couple of lighted stars so high in the heavens that they could not have been installed without the help of Duke Energy’s cherry pickers. The swags of colored lights along the roadway seem to extend for miles.

But shortly after they end, you’ll be at the entrance to Chandler’s Green, where decorating with outdoor holiday lights is a blood sport. From Sunrise, turn left onto Sweeten Creek Road and drive slow. You’ll miss too much if you drive the speed limit.

Turn right on Silver Creek to get to Weaver Dairy, where, if you turn left, then make a right on Sedgefield, you’ll wind around until you T-bone into a view inside a house on Honeysuckle that we call “The Tall Tree House.” Through the double-story window, you can see a double-story tree. This year the homeowners have added blinky lights to really catch your attention.

From Sedgefield, turn right onto Honeysuckle, right again onto Brookview, then up a steep hill before making a left onto Riggsbee. Where Riggsbee T’s into Piney Mountain Road, you’ll notice that the Johnsons have added even more lights this year. We know it’s the Johnsons because a sign near the driveway says so.

Turn left onto Piney Mountain and once you cross Booker Creek, turn right onto Old Forest Creek. You’ll see a house lit up like a birthday cake. Continue around the Old Forest Creek circle to spot the house that has, through the illusion of lights, created a snowfall.

Merry Christmas, if you celebrate; Happy Solstice, if you don’t.
– Nancy Oates and Don Evans