N.J. house wins ‘The Great Christmas Light Fight,’ $50K prize. Meet the holiday masterminds.

There’s extra reason for celebration tonight at Frostland Village.

That’s what Michael McCarty and Lyle Williams call the Christmas extravaganza currently enveloping their Pitman home.

On Thursday night, they could finally let their friends, family and neighbors know — they won “The Great Christmas Light Fight.”

The married couple squared off against Christmas enthusiasts from Florida, Texas and Illinois in an episode of the ABC reality competition that showcases elaborate displays of lights and holiday decor.

McCarty and Williams spoke with NJ Advance Media ahead of the episode’s airing.

The winner of each installment receives the Christmas light trophy and $50,000.

“It hasn’t even honestly set in, even though it’s been a full year that we’ve known about it,” says McCarty, 36. “Like, I guess until the check clears, then it’ll feel real.”

“We’ve been lying to all of our friends and family for an entire year now,” he says. “It’s insane. We didn’t expect to win. We’re more than grateful that we did. We’re extremely excited. I’m probably going to take the money and reinvest it into Christmas. It’s an addiction that’s just going to keep growing.”

They opened their annual explosion of Christmas cheer Nov. 29. The Gloucester County home, decked to the nines, is a local favorite, driving revelers from all across South Jersey, but also from well beyond — they say people have visited from as far as Maine, Idaho, Florida and California.

The display, located at 23 Euclid Ave. in Pitman, is made up of various ornate scenes populated by vintage animatronic characters, which are McCarty’s specialty. Visitors flock to his creations for their quality craftsmanship — a mix between New York’s Christmas window displays at Fifth Avenue and Herald Square and the inside of the rides at Disney World, like It’s a Small World.

Each scene, or vignette, tells a story, whether it’s elves chopping peppermint to make candy canes, or a treehouse where woodland animals hang out. McCarty hand-paints backdrops and rehabilitates old Christmas decor to tell those stories.

McCarty, an artist who makes dolls and owns Rugged Chic Decor, a home decor business, and Williams, a jet pilot, have been lovingly designing and constructing their holiday displays for a decade.

“We went really big starting in 2020 when people couldn’t really travel out for COVID,” says McCarty, who has lived in Pitman since 2018 and grew up in Blue Anchor, Hammonton.

“Once the COVID years happened, we were like ‘hey, let’s bring New York City down to South Jersey’ … And then it kind of just exploded. We started the first year with only having, like, four little displays with animation, and now we’ve grown to have pretty much 25 displays of animation.”

This year, Frostland Village boasts vintage Saks Fifth Avenue animated displays from 1992 featuring showgirls representing different cities. McCarty built backgrounds for each dancer.

A centerpiece of their brilliant display is a Christmas tree made from blow molds, or illuminated plastic holiday figures, stacked into a festive shape.

The “tree,” which gives off much more light than your average strand-draped tree, is a glorious, whimsical, nostalgia-fueled remixing of tradition. By taking old-school lawn decor and fashioning it into a fresh yuletide wonder, they made a standout statement piece adored by the show’s host, Taniya Nayak.

“I’ve never seen blow molds used in this way before,” she told Williams and McCarty during the episode.

The tree is also particularly fitting since blow molds are key to the origin story of Frostland Village.

“Michael wanted to decorate for Christmas one year, and it all started out with us buying a storage unit full of blow molds,” says Williams, 38.

The hollow plastic figures, which started to become popular in the 1960s, are named for the aluminum molds used to make the happy snowmen, elves, Santas and other characters — air is blown into hot plastic, which takes the shape of the mold.

“I kind of come up with the crazy ideas and I rope Lyle into going along with them,” McCarty says of his husband.

He developed the blow mold tree idea about four years ago and started building the structure, but it wasn’t until he had an epiphany that the current version took hold.

Williams and McCarty were buying out a mall’s old Christmas display when McCarty spied a Christmas tree frame and pictured it covered in the plastic figures. He used zip ties to secure each one to the frame.

Another part of the meticulous holiday presentation, housed in their garage, also wowed Nayak.

They devised a bakery scene populated by animatronic figures, gingerbread houses on a conveyor belt and a giant cake in the middle, specifically for Nayak, a celebrity designer who has also appeared on HGTV and the Food Network.

If they got a different judge, they would have gone in a different direction, McCarty says.

Whatever transpired, they were well prepared. They have so many animated figures that they could go for three or four years and not repeat a scene.

When the holiday figures aren’t in use, the live in storage units ready to be awakened for their next Christmas performance.

(Not) dreaming of a rainy Christmas

McCarty and Williams filmed “The Great Christmas Light Fight” last year.

While they won for the 2023 display, much of what’s seen on TV has been preserved for 2024 (apart from some additions, like those New York window animatronics). They usually start completely new each year, but they wanted people to be able to see everything from the televised win in person.

During the filming of the episode, it was pouring out — not the ideal circumstances for their big reveal. But the Williams and McCarty, wearing old-timey outfits and top hats for the occasion, did their best to put on smiles for the camera. They knew they would only get one chance.

“We felt so down in the dumps because we’re standing in our driveway filming the last segment where Taniya walks away and we have, like, at least four inches of rain running down our driveway through our shoes and we’re like, ‘this is miserable,’” McCarty says.

So when producers called to say the rain had messed up some scenes and they had to come back for more filming, it was a completely believable claim. In reality, Nayak, the host, was back to announce they had won “The Great Christmas Light Fight.”

“The Great Christmas Light Fight” had contacted McCarty and Williams a few times to be on the show. They were cast in season 11, but had to back out because of a work conflict. When they expressed interest in being a part of season 12, producers were all ears.

“They had us in a FaceTime meeting within the hour, it felt like,” says McCarty, who has been working in home decor for 18 years.

“I’ve been very, very artistic my entire life,” he says.

He studied set design and theater at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Through the experience, he learned what he didn’t want to do.

“It was a lot of just sitting down and drafting out set designs where I wanted to, hands on, go and make the displays myself,” McCarty says.

He went on to work as a theater director at Winslow Township High School for several years.

McCarty met Williams, who is originally from Idaho, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They moved north when Williams’ job relocated him to Jersey, staying with McCarty’s parents before settling in their own home in 2018. Of course, that meant Christmas decorating was on.

“We weren’t really into what was in the big box stores,” he says. “I was gravitating more towards the vintage kind of stuff, but we didn’t know how to go about finding it,” McCarty says. “This was back before Facebook Marketplace was really a big thing. And so we went on old-school Craigslist, and that’s when we gathered … this blow mold collection, and we set it up our first year, and thought we were the coolest kids in town, having, I don’t know, maybe 50 blow molds. And now we’re up to at least 600 blow molds at this point.”

While McCarty is the artistic mastermind of the home Christmas spectacular, Williams plays an important part, too.

“A lot of the animation that we have in our display we’ve acquired through pretty much the entire United States,” McCarty says. “And with Lyle being a pilot, he’s able to, if I find a piece I want to purchase in, like, California, he might have a trip out there, and then he can throw it on the plane and bring it back. Lyle is able to go and ship it back to us. So we’re able to then have a wider reach of collecting more Christmas decorations than just the tri-state area.”

For McCarty and Williams, it’s a yearlong pursuit that never ends with January. They make vacations of the quest for holiday adornments, setting out in their RV to take Christmas-minded excursions.

“Mike and Lyle: Christmas Collectors” seems like it could be its own reality show.

“Honestly, it could be,” McCarty says. “They could make so much money if they follow us with cameras.”

He’s been watching “The Great Christmas Light Fight” since the first season in 2013.

“I never thought that I would be able to be in a position to go and actually have a display this big for myself,” he says.

A yearlong quest — by plane, RV and more

Just how long does it take to create such an artful expression of Christmas?

While they refurbish and repair animatronics all year, McCarty and Williams commence their assembly of holiday decorations when the last trick-or-treater leaves on Halloween.

Williams starts by getting up on the roof and lining it with lights.

“We will work, like, 12-hour days up until the day after Thanksgiving, when we light up every year,” says McCarty, who collects David Hamberger holiday displays.

“David Hamberger created pretty much every animatronic that’s in our front lawn,” he says. “They closed in the early 2000s, so to find some of their pieces is near impossible at this point, because originally they were only designed to last around three years, and they were not meant to be fixed.”

But fix them they do, restoring the figures — often used to decorate shopping malls and department stores during the heyday of retail — to their original glory and placing them in various scenes of their home display. Old malls, and former mall employees who salvage the figures, have been a boon to McCarty’s collection.

Williams and McCarty have “no idea” how much they’ve spent on the hobby.

“Sometimes we’ll find some animation pieces that have (been) donated to us for free,” McCarty says. “And then there’s other ones that I paid way too much money for.”

But locals surely benefit from the investment. Many have made a yearly tradition of visiting the house.

“Most people, if they’re able, they do park their car, get out and walk the display, because we do let them walk up our driveways,” McCarty says. “I wish more people would control their kids, though, because they kind of let them go loose like it’s Disney World.”

When he was a kid, his parents would take him to the animated Christmas display at Freida & Fred’s Garden Center (now closed) in Berlin, Camden County. The tradition ignited some of that spark that still powers his passion today.

The display is open to the public until the first week in January, but they don’t pack away all the bells and whistles until almost Easter.

After appearing on the ABC show, they’re bracing for a bump in visitors.

McCarty and Williams normally host thousands of people on weeknights during prime holiday season.

They expect that crowd to grow starting Friday — so actually, they wouldn’t mind a bit of rain … this time.

“The Great Christmas Light Fight” airs 8 p.m. ET and 9 p.m. ET Thursdays on ABC and is streaming on Hulu. Frostland Village is open until the first week in January is at 23 Euclid Ave., Pitman; visit @frostlandvillage on Instagram or Frostland Village on Facebook.