ABC
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The holiday spirit just grew even brighter at The Biggest Little Christmas in Phoenix.
The jam-packed display at the north Phoenix home of Carl and Patty Jimenez won ABC’s “The Great Christmas Light Fight” on Thursday. Their four-bedroom home sits near Union Hills Drive and First Avenue.
Carter Oosterhouse, host of the hit reality competition series, named The Biggest Little Christmas in Phoenix the episode’s best display. The Jimenezes bested California’s Palusso family and Maryland’s Greason family for the win.
Oosterhouse praised the couple’s geeky creativity and their ability to squeeze big holiday fun into their compact front and side yards.
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The couple will now make room among their busy display of blow molds, miniature vignettes and cheeky hidden details for a golden trophy awarded on the show. Fittingly, it resembles a glowing Christmas light bulb. They also pocketed a $50,000 cash prize.
ABC
‘You packed everything in there’
The episode segment featuring the Jimenezes toured every nook and cranny of their display, which the couple launched in 2014. As Carl Jimenez explained on the show, the packed layout reflects the limited yard space at their four-bedroom home.
“We’re landlocked at the amount of space we have,” he said.
And there’s plenty to see at The Biggest Little Christmas in Phoenix. Highlights include a legion of glowing plastic blow-mold snowmen, a flock of 22 penguins and a kid-sized “Winterfest” holiday village.
The display also features “Gingerassic Park,” complete with inflatable dinosaurs, and a MicroTree billed as Arizona’s tiniest Christmas tree and viewable through a microscope.
Oosterhouse marveled at how much the couple squeezed into the compact space, down to tiny details like a miniature TV inside one house playing an episode of “The Great Christmas Light Fight.”
“You weren’t kidding, you packed everything in there,” Oosterhouse said on the episode.
The Biggest Little Christmas in Phoenix refelect the Jimenez’s geeky interests. Both are longtime Disney nerds, “Star Wars” fans and even organized a Phoenix event called Dinocon in the 2010s.
“We’ve tried to create the kind of display we’d want to go visit,” Carl Jimenez told ABC15 recently. “It’s a really small lot, so we try to do as much as we can with the space.”
Their displays started out as a modest display of decorations and lgiths but expanded over the last 11 years. It’s now a full-blown walk-through experience.
“People ask, ‘Is it weird when people are in your yard?’ Well, yes, but also it’s great because we can hear them in the house, and we hear the parents and the kids enjoying their time together,” Patty Jimenez told ABC15.
“The Great Christmas Light Fight” has featured more than a dozen Arizona holiday displays since the show’s debut. The couple joins a list of previous Valley winners as Scottsdale’s Birkett family, Gilbert’s Christmas on Comstock neighborhood and Phoenix couple Mel and Patti Tasker.
A second Phoenix display, Santa’s Castle, is set to appear on the Dec. 11 episode of “The Great Christmas Light Fight.” The show starts at 7 p.m. on ABC15.
