Dyker Heights Christmas Lights: Holiday Joy, Only One Skeleton

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — It all started with one house in 1986, and now it’s taken over a neighborhood.

The annual Dyker Heights Christmas Lights show is a unique tradition in Brooklyn where a number of private homes deck their homes out in lights, holiday sculptures, figurines and, at one home, a gigantic skeleton.

According to Tony Muia, who runs tour company A Slice Of Brooklyn and has been bringing groups to see the lights for years, everybody has their own reasons for putting in the hours it takes to drape their home in over-the-top Christmas decorations.

For example, Lucy Spata, long heralded as the progenitor of the Dyker Heights tradition — as well as sausage proprietor, does it to honor her mother who also loved to go overboard come December, Muia said.

“Some of those decorations go back to her mother's,” Muia said, “like the angels and the choir singers.”

At first some neighbors balked at her blazing display, even calling the cops on her, but the Brooklynite wouldn’t back down easily from sharing her holiday spirit, the tour guide said.

In response, Spata hired Christmas carolers to sing outside of her house.

“That's why we love Lucy,” Muia said. “You don't mess with Lucy. She's just a classic Italian American Brooklynite. She's tough.”

Her determined cheer spread across the street, where a cancer survivor decided to create a gigantic light display of his own.

“He was like: ‘No, what Lucy is doing is good,” Muia said, adding that eventually the rest of the neighborhood joined in the fun.

“Little by little people realized: if you can't beat them, join them,” he told Patch.

Thursday night was Muia’s first night of touring the lights, and the first time they’ve run the tour since the pandemic hit.

Muia said the number of international visitors wanting to get on a bus in Union Square to travel deep into Brooklyn always surprises him.

“Last night on the bus alone, we had people from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, England and the United States,” Muia said.

Muia said his Brooklyn-based tours started as a hobby back when he worked as a respiratory therapist, but became a full-time gig in 2005.

“My whole thing has always been like: how do we bring tourism to the borough?” he said.

He started with tours of pizza shops (L&B is his favorite), movie locations, breweries and distilleries, but added the Dyker Heights show a year later.

Muia, who grew up in Bensonhurst with Italian immigrant parents, says the lights are an important part of the Italian-American culture in Brooklyn.

“It was always such a special part of growing up in Brooklyn,” he said.