William Reira
Audio By Carbonatix
A pair of Phoenix’s best holiday light displays will shine on national television this December on “The Great Christmas Light Fight.”
ABC’s hit reality competition series will spotlight Valley favorites The Biggest Little Christmas in Phoenix and Santa’s Castle in its new season.
The popular show airs each Christmas season and pits wildly decked-out homes from across the country against one another. The winner earns $50,000 in cash and a gold trophy shaped like a Christmas light bulb.
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The Biggest Little Christmas in Phoenix appears on the season premiere airing Thursday, Dec. 4, facing California’s Palusso Family Light Show and Maryland’s Mr. Christmas. The episode featuring Santa’s Castle airs Thursday, Dec. 11, competing against the Paul family and New Jersey’s Lights on Bryn Mawr.
“The Great Christmas Light Fight” airs locally on ABC15.
The two displays join a growing list of heavily decorated Phoenix homes featured on the hit ABC series, which has spotlighted more than a dozen Arizona families. Both also fit seamlessly into the show’s trademark excess, spectacle and festive one-upmanship.
Carl Jimenez
‘Loads of delightful details into a small space’
The Biggest Little Christmas in Phoenix is the brainchild of Valley resident Carl Jimenez. The self-described “Disney nerd” has assembled the display at his north Phoenix home for more than a decade.
It began in 2014 with a modest mix of lights and decorations. A year later, a snowman, a gingerbread woman and glowing candy canes joined the display.
Jimenez’s passion for decorating extends beyond Christmas. Each year, he also transforms his home for holidays like St. Patrick’s Day and the Fourth of July. Every October, he fills the yard with dozens of plastic jack-o-lanterns for his Happy Haunted Pumpkin Patch.
When Christmas arrives, Jimenez goes all out. The Biggest Little Christmas in Phoenix now covers his driveway, front yard and side yard. As he told Phoenix New Times last year, the display “packs loads of delightful details into a small space.”
Currently, his setup operates as a full-blown Christmas village filled with light, color and motion. It features 23 themed vignettes, 120 nutcrackers, 154 blow molds, five inflatable dinosaurs, two window displays, 19 penguins and 22 elves. The display also includes a hidden holiday village and a MicroTree, which Jimenez calls “Arizona’s tiniest Christmas tree.”
‘Our Christmas card to our friends and community’
A few miles west, Santa’s Castle channels the same spirit of festive excess. Phoenix resident Bill Riera and his family create the holiday display each year at their home near 39th Avenue south of Bell Road.
The display is both majestic and colorful. Visitors enter through a Christmas tree-shaped archway and into a glowing field of color. More than 100,000 lights blanket the home’s exterior as illuminated candy canes rise from the yard and snowflakes shimmer along the roofline.
The centerpiece is a whimsical storybook fortress crowned with icicle lights that drip from the eaves like frozen fringe. A pair of double doors leads to Santa’s workshop, which glows with a hearth, wrapped gifts, festive decor and an animatronic Kris Kringle.
Like The Biggest Little Christmas in Phoenix, Santa’s Castle has grown and evolved over the years. The scale has expanded steadily, climbing from 25,000 lights in 2020 to more than 100,000 this year. Riera added the castle-style facade in 2023.
As he told New Times in 2024, the display is “our Christmas card to our friends and community.”
Riera has stayed quiet about details of his episode of “The Great Christmas Light Fight” but teased the appearance on Facebook last month. “The best part is knowing a lot of people will see our display and sharing our Christmas joy with them,” he wrote.
