Holiday Houses

Every Christmas the Paez family brings Bay Ridge to Southampton.

Their 17-year tradition of stringing thousands of lights along the three stories of their Cedar Street home—born from matriarch Catherine Paez’s fond childhood memories of her father’s elaborate Christmas decorations in Brooklyn—almost came to a halt this December, thanks to Hurricane Sandy, Ms. Paez explained during a visit to her shingle-style home last week.

“I thought it was sending a message, ‘Here you are lighting up all your lights and there’s people without homes and who still don’t have power,’” she said, speaking over the Christmas music playing softly in the background. “But the more I talked to people, we decided to go ahead and do it. They, and we, needed it. It’s been a tradition.”

Until now, many people didn’t even know of the Paez home, which is set back off the street, and its lights, with the exception of the 60 to 100 or so guests who annually attend the family’s open house. On Sunday, December 2, weatherman Jeff Smith of WABC-TV, local channel 7, featured the home as the first holiday photo in his report. He described it by saying, “Clark Griswold moved out to Long Island ... This is a lot of lights but very tastefully done here.”

“My husband, Michael, was smiling ear to ear,” Ms. Paez said.

The decorating process begins in mid-November, she said, when Mr. Paez begins testing all the lights. There are at least 40 strands, the couple’s 17-year-old daughter, Katie, pointed out, resulting in thousands of individual bulbs.

“It’s a lot of fun growing up in this house, especially when I have friends who come over to see it and, like, their mouths just drop,” she said. “My friend Tim came to our holiday party and I saw him walking into the house and his mouth was hanging down to his knees. It was hysterical.”

By Thanksgiving weekend, the house is lit and the tree is up, Ms. Paez said, thanks in part to their Thanksgiving guests.

“They’re workers, actually,” she laughed. “They celebrate Thanksgiving, but it’s all about getting all this up. I think we have a good system down. My husband has only one person to help him and it’s my best friend’s 10-year-old son who had a fear of heights until he got him on the roof to help put up Santa and his reindeer.”

Though the exterior lights get the most attention, the family’s prized possession is the Christmas tree, which features hundreds of decorations, including bows, balls, hand-blown Polish ornaments of “The Wizard of Oz” cast and, perhaps most unexpectedly, pigs.

“My dad used to be in the pork business, so everybody gives me pigs,” Ms. Paez said. “And my expression to my daughter is always, ‘When pigs fly.’ So I always get the flying pigs.”

“We have at least 25 pigs on that tree,” Katie added. “Yeah, we’re the pig people.”

Further west, in East Quogue, there are very few ornaments on Vito Gentile’s Christmas tree that he bought himself. The tradition began in 1972, he said last week during an interview at the home he shares with his partner, Peter Beston. It started when he moved into a Washington Square studio in Manhattan with nothing but a tuxedo couch, a table and four chairs, he explained.

“One day, I was sitting in my apartment and the bell rang,” Mr. Gentile recalled. “It was my friend Joe and his girlfriend Toni, one of the most beautiful girls I ever saw. They said, ‘We’ve come to buy you a house gift.’ I said, ‘What is that?’ They said, ‘A Christmas tree.’ And into the car we go and we go onto the West Side Highway and they picked the biggest tree in the world.”

They dragged the tree—which was 9 feet tall by 8 feet wide, Mr. Gentile said—back to his sparse apartment, and once his friends left, he felt overwhelmed.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?’” he said.

At that moment, he had an idea. He called up everyone he knew and invited them over. At least 50 of his friends arrived with ornaments.

“Things happened that day because they all enjoyed decorating that tree and all those people who are still alive are still giving me ornaments every year,” he said. “There’s got to be 1,500 different crazy things on there, from both here and London, where Peter and I lived for 13 years. When there’s so much going on, you don’t have to stand there and look and say, ‘Okay, this should go there.’ You just find a hole. You just fill the tree. The ornaments go all the way back. And we play lots of Christmas music. We must have 100 Christmas albums.”

Mr. Gentile’s love for the holiday also stems from his childhood growing up in Brooklyn, he said. Because of his Italian family, the smell of fish means Christmas.

“We’d eat 24 fish dishes on Christmas Eve that my father would make, and he made them look beautiful. And my mother’s job was lasagnas and turkeys and all. The table would go forever.” “And then, you don’t even sleep. I used to stay up. I used to sit near the fireplace in my pajamas and just wait. All my cousins would stay over and we’d sleep long-ways in the beds and you’d hear the parents in the kitchen arguing while putting together toys. And people would come in to see if I was still up. Then, all of a sudden, I’d just turn my head and there’s a box underneath my arm and I’m surrounded. I’d run through the house screaming and that meant everyone was up. And my father would want to kill me because they’d just gone to sleep.”

He smiled at the memory, and then mused, “My parents had a wonderful Christmas tree. We grew up with lots of love.”

Another of Mr. Gentile’s holiday traditions also began in the 1970s, just three years after the poet and playwright moved to Manhattan. In 1975, for the first time, he decided to send out one of his poems as a Christmas card to his immediate family.

But when he asked them what they thought, his parents and siblings asked, “What did it say?”

Mr. Gentile is dyslexic.

“It was the first Christmas poem I’d written but didn’t have the nerve to send it out at first because I couldn’t spell. I tried not to use commas because in school they never taught me punctuation; they left me in the back of the room to daydream, which was fine,” he laughed. “So the next year, I carefully typed it down and I was having lunch with a friend of mine who was a graphic designer. I said, ‘I wrote this poem and no one understood it last year and now I think the spelling’s right and I want to send it out. But I went to all the printers and no one had Christmas red [the color], like ‘Bang, in your face.’” So he said, ‘Let me ask around.’”

A week later, Mr. Gentile had a box of 1,000 Christmas-red cards, courtesy of his well-connected friend. He sat down and compiled a list of family, neighbors, co-workers, friends from grade and high school, and pals from his days in the Army.

“I got up to 350 people who probably never expected to get a card from me. And this started my great Christmas list,” he said. “Many, many, thank God, people after all these years are still on the list. This is the first poem that went out.”

He cleared his throat, picked up his recently published book, “Fifty Poems About Christmas,” and read:

“That one moment

When for no apparent reason

The memories of your childhood

Of friends

And most of all, loved ones

Condense into a single teardrop

Appearing indiscriminately in the corner

Of one of your eyes

Is known as Christmas.”

He sighed, smiling. “And that’s all it is.”