The bright stuff

Like most college students coming home for the holiday break, Jeff Hassay needed a part-time job that he could easily drop before returning to school for the spring semester. His roommate at UC Santa Barbara, who also lived in Orange County, told him about hanging holiday lights for money.

The roommate put up lights on the county’s east side while Hassay, a Huntington Beach resident, hit the west side.

“I used to just do it for my parents and their friends; that’s how I made money during my vacation,” Hassay said.

Fifteen years later, the now-31-year-old still spends Decembers hanging strands of holiday cheer for a living. And his clientele list spans from San Clemente to Long Beach, including some of the upper-crust of the Southern California coast.

On Friday, Hassay decorated a house on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach. The job took a little more than two hours and 40 strands, or 4000, lights.

“It was pretty cool, just all multicolored lights covering all these bushes and trees,” Hassay said. “We only did a little bit of the house, which is kind of anomalous — normally we do just the house.”

Some customers, envisioning a personal masterpiece, provide Hassay with the lights. But most of the time he brings his own. Trying to stock up on supplies before Thanksgiving, he purchases around $1,000 in lights each season.

Old lights are “just a pain to unpack and untangle, and about 25% don’t work if they were up the year before,” Hassay said.

Hassay knows he has bought enough for the season when the boxes of lights nearly fill up one room in his home.

Prices vary according to time, cost of supplies and the difficulty of each design. Some homes are easier to scale than others. Averaging $350 to $400 a house, Hassay has surpassed the $1,000 mark once or twice.

His roommate, who he still keeps in touch with, has charged upwards of $2,000 for one job. That’s a lot of green to fork out before even shopping for gifts, but when you’re talking about large homes and mansions those customers aren’t as concerned about holiday budgets.

“It depends on what people want,” Hassay said, adding that most want white icicle lights, which once was a technique involving the twisting of regular strands of white lights in a pattern that emulates icicles. “When I started, they didn’t even exist, and that was one of the services we offered.”

Having those available in a pre-arranged pattern saves Hassay a lot of time.

Setting up one of Hassay’s light shows can take anywhere between 90 minutes and six hours.

“[Now] hanging stuff from roofs is generally what takes a lot of time — and the extension cords, properly wiring everything,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of houses and never set one on fire. Now the lights don’t cause a short — they all have fuses.”

Having strung his last house on Wednesday, the hardest part is over for Hassay, but the job is far from done. Hassay will return to every one of the approximately 40 homes he decorated to take down the lights, starting right after Christmas through the beginning of January. And with the cold, wet weather expected in the next few days, he anticipates revisiting about 5% to 10% of those homes to repair fallen strands and busted bulbs.

Hassay considers the maintenance an extra service that he throws in for free.

Speaking of charity, on the other side of the spectrum there are some who cannot afford to string their own lights. So for the past three years, Mitch Cottrell helps one non-profit organization glimmer with electric light for the holiday season.

On Dec. 13, a number of Cottrell’s employees hung lights on the Huntington Beach Community Care Center, stringing the roof with white lights, and turning the sign into a giant glowing candy cane.

It feel great to have little holiday cheer come their way, center secretary Marilyn Berglund said.

“We’re so excited This is such an awesome gift he’s given us,” Berglund said. “The kids don’t have that much and this is so big.”

The donation to the center included two bikes, which was a nice prelude to Santa’s scheduled visit on Friday. Plus, the lights are theirs to keep, Cottrell said.