by JIM MERRIT
DRESSED LIKE one of Santa's elves, Luis Lara scrambles across the roof of the Greenlawn colonial. Wearing the signature red sweatshirt and cap of Looks Great Services Christmas Decor, Lara, 35, has spent the better part of this wintry mid-November day stringing lights onto Janet and Ravi Jasuja's home. Now he's double-checking to see that the job was done right.
Strings of lights and green extension cords crisscross the still verdant lawn and the landscaped garden. Standing on a 14-foot A-frame ladder, co-worker Fernando Ortes, 40, replaces defective icicle lights along the roof line. Then Kristian Agoglia rides into the air in the bucket attached to the 60-foot boom of a truck parked in the driveway and stops right next to a light-dappled eave.
"I need to check the connections to make sure the circuit breaker in the house is not overloaded," says Agoglia, 26, a rangy 6-footer who runs Looks Great Services with his father, Joe, 55.
Like a growing number of Long Island families, the Jasujas are avoiding the exhausting, thumb- smashing, vertigo-inducing labor of putting up their own outdoor decorations by bringing in the pros.
Between mid-October and Christmas Eve, Agoglia expects to have lighted more than 50 houses and commercial buildings in western Suffolk. Two other Long Island companies are reporting similar high demand and packed schedules.
For between $500 and $1,500, they'll deck your house with lights and holly, and you won't have to lift a finger other than to flick a switch to enjoy the show. If you have mega-sugarplum visions, big bucks and an even bigger palace, you can spend upward of $10,000 by including such things as lighted treesand elaborate models of Old St. Nick and his reindeer, as a Lloyd Harbor family did this year. (With some companies you're buying the equipment so subsequent installations can cost less.)
Who are the customers? "Usually it's two-income homes where they don't have the time to do decorations for their children," says Agoglia, whose year-old Christmas Decor business is part of a national franchise operation. "But we also get calls from senior citizens and handicapped people who miss the traditions of Christmas. Above all, they want to maintain the traditions for their kids and grandkids."
"We hear, 'My husband's too old to do decorations,' 'My son's at college and could care less,' 'I'm doing it for my grandchildren' and 'It just wouldn't be Christmas without lights,'" says Steven Greenspan of Christmas Home Decoration in Huntington. Greenspan has been dressing homes for the holidays in Glen Cove, Brookville, Muttontown and other Nassau communities for six years.
With about 40 jobs planned this season, Greenspan will be choosing from a palette of about 25 light colors and customized gadgets such as snowflakes or starbursts. "I'm the artist painting your home with colored lights," he says. Though most of the demand is for Christmas decorations, Greenspan also has done a blue-and-white Chanukah display for a Jewish family in Huntington.
Companies that do this work tend to do related jobs the rest of the year: Agoglia's Looks Great Services in Huntington does landscaping and property maintenance; Greenspan does poison ivy control; and Jay Luyster, who has another Christmas Decor franchise, does lawncare and landscaping.
In his second year working the Islip and Brookhaven area, Luyster, based in Ronkonkoma, also has seen a rising demand for twinkling facades and awe-inspiring yard displays. "The main thing is lighting on the house," he says. "We do a lot of branch wraps on trees. People are asking to have their bushes lit, for ground lighting." His best seller for Christmas, 2000: lots of clear white lights, ranging from 11/2-inch-long C-9 bulbs to minilights.
For Mary Pat and Joseph Mangine of South Huntington, having professionals decorate the yard means getting that much closer to the home-style holidays she cherished growing up in a big family in Ohio. Last year, her brothers and father decorated the blue spruce in the Mangines' front yard, but, with memories of blown circuits, this year they decided to hire Agoglia to festoon the tree with 3,000 minilights and dozens of red ribbons.
"I just enjoy the elegance of it," Mary Pat Mangine says of the decorated tree, lit up the day after Thanksgiving. "It brings a lot of joy and happiness into the house at this time of year."
The Jasujas have their own reasons for hiring the guys in the red suits bearing green garbage cans full of lights. Four months ago, they moved from Corona to their new house at 64 Timber Ridge Dr. Janet, a teacher's aide at PS 14 in Queens, and Ravi, a travel agent in Manhattan, have saved all year to foot the $4,447 they are paying Christmas Decor. They are doing it for their children, Vanessa, 2, and Michael, 10. Says Janet Jasuja: "This is going to be our first Christmas in this house, and we really want it to look nice and give a feeling of the season."
Previously, the Jasujas met with Agoglia, who drew a rough sketch of what they wanted and went over a checklist of decoration options. "They circled everything," says Agoglia: icicle lights, C-9's and minilights on the house, 400 white minis in the front yard. Two-hundred cherry-red minilights wrapped in inch-wide spirals up the front-yard cherry tree.
A grand total of 5,000 points of light.
The mechanics, of course, were left to Agoglia, such as how to rig light strings so they wouldn't trip circuit breakers and where to hide the extension cords (in the cracks between the boards of the front porch, for one).
Dusk is falling and the Jasujas won't see the results until they arrive home later in the evening. But before Agoglia and his five-person crew pack up and go back to the shop to reload the trucks for the next day, they step back to inspect their handiwork.
"The job looks good," says Ortes, scanning the house with its constellation of lights twinkling against the darkening sky.
Agoglia agrees: "It looks like Christmas."
Jim Merritt is a frequent contributor to Newsday.
