The holidays are approaching, and once again, many residents on North Whidbey have committed to going all-in with their light displays.

Each year, Oak Harbor resident Carrie Stucky creates a map highlighting the community’s most impressive holiday light displays. The map guides residents to rooftops decked in color, trees shimmering in the dark and homes where projections animate the walls.

Among them, no display is quite as dazzling or decadent as the one crafted by Debra Sims at her famous Hastie Lake Christmas House. For 10 days each year, she works with five family members to adorn her house and property with an expansive Christmas light exhibit — complete with sea creatures, dinosaurs, an igloo, a moving beehive and dozens of unique animals and landmarks.

Visitors can walk through the free exhibit, watch a video of Santa appearing in a window, drop letters into the Santa mailbox, hop across lighted stepping-stones and take photos galore. The display has been perfected down to a science, with even a pulley system in the trees.

The spectacle is fueled by Sims’ determination to outdo the year before. She refers to sections of her display as “rooms,” each with its own significance. Her favorites are the under-the-sea area and the beehive. Though she has no idea how many lights she uses, she noted that her “gnarly” tree alone has 5,000 lights.

“My husband would say too many,” she added.

One of the most meaningful sections of her display is the Dutch display, an homage to Oak Harbor’s Dutch history and inspired by the iconic windmill that stood at City Beach Park (now Windjammer Park) for decades. Re-creating it in lights, she said, was a way to memorialize it. The tulips accompanying it honor the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.

Other sections of the display reflect Whidbey heritage, such as the Admiralty Head Lighthouse, while many displays represent the broader Pacific Northwest, from orcas to a seaplane, to a state ferry, and more.

While Sims initially purchased many of the metal frames for her lights, over the past several years she has learned to weld and bend metal herself, allowing her to make many of the newer custom pieces.

Though the exhibit requires long days of labor, significant expense and constant creativity, the Sims family continues to offer it free of charge. As the display has become a beloved tradition among local families, Sims believes experiences like this should never depend on the ability to pay an entry fee.

Her obsession for making light displays is “madness,” she admitted, bit it’s something she looks forward to each year.

“I love the connections we make and the amazing people we encounter, some of whom have become like extensions of our own family,” Silver said. “There is something so magical about taking an empty, dark space and completely transforming it.”

Her devotion, she added, comes from witnessing the happiness her lights inspire.

“We love watching the kids’ faces light up at the display but there is something so special about watching adults light up with memories of their childhood Christmases,” she said.

Each night, the Sims collect the letters from the Santa mailbox and send them express to the North Pole.

“We’ve found that if the letters get sent to him within a certain time — mail to the North Pole is very slow — that he’ll write back,” Sims said.

Dec. 7 marked this year’s cutoff, and Santa received more than 200 letters by the deadline. Parents can check the Hastie Lake Christmas House Facebook page each year to confirm drop-off dates.

(Photo provided by Oak Harbor resident Carry Stucky) The map illustrates the best places to catch the holiday lights in Oak Harbor.

(Photo by Marina Blatt) The Hastie Lake Christmas House will be decked out in thousands of lights until Dec. 25.

(Photo by Marina Blatt) The beehive, that showcases animated bee wings, is a new addition to this year’s light display at the Hastie Lake Christmas House.