The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights - History

History

Jennings Osborne (1943-2011), along with his wife Mitzi, founded the "Arkansas Research Medical Testing Center" in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1968. The business' success allowed him and his wife to eventually purchase a large estate in the middle of town in 1976. In 1980 the Osbornes had a daughter, Allison Brianne Osborne (nicknamed "Little Breezy").

In 1986, Breezy made a very simple request of her parents for Christmas ... to decorate their home in lights. Jennings gladly complied, stringing 1000 lights around their home. "Each year after that, it got bigger and bigger," Osborne would later recall. So big, in fact, that Osborne purchased the two properties adjacent to his own and expanded the display into them.

By 1993, the display had over three million lights. Some of the more prominent features included:

• an illuminated globe, with Little Rock and Bethlehem marked, mounted in the back yard;
• two rotating carousels of lights, placed on each end of the estate's circular driveway;
• a 70-foot (21 m)-tall Christmas tree of lights with 80,000 lights in three colored layers, mounted atop the home's kitchen; and
• a canopy of 30,000 red lights over a section of the driveway.

The lights were a wildly popular attraction, both in Arkansas and around the world, as news crews often visited to film the display.

Mr. Osborne's barbecue benefit (unrelated but notable in its immense scale, comparable to his light display) was featured in an episode of the television travelogue Man v. Food.