In State Center, Iowa, a town of barely a thousand people that, in fact, occupies the state’s center, there’s a small white house whose owners deck the halls with an extravagance that verges on the fantastic. From the beginning of October to the week after New Year’s, the home of Dwayne and Janet Pundt (they like to be called “Old Man Pundt” and “Old Lady Pundt”) is a carnival of lights, choo-choos, and smiling, waving Santas. Passersby are sadly oblivious, however, because the Pundts, unlike their flashier neighbors, keep all the decorations inside their home. Standing on the front stoop, stomping away slivers of boot snow, visitors glimpse not a single light. The shades are drawn tight to prevent the leakage of even the tiniest twinkle or gleam.
It’s an approach that both builds curiosity and maximizes impact, explains Old Lady Pundt, who’s standing in her kitchen, a mélange of Christmas melodies pinging away in the background. Keeping their sizeable yard empty and sign-free (tours are by invitation only) also serves to force people inside, where jocund smiles and a keg of beer awaits. “When you walk in, it’s instant Christmas! I like to see their eyes brighten.” She sees that look—of surprise, of wonder, of complete shock—a lot. Regular visitors include school kids, members of the ladies’ club, and gawkers from nearby towns. “One time, a gal wanted to bring a whole busload of people,” recalls Old Man Pundt. “That was a bit too much.” The Pundts’ own family of two kids, a handful of grandchildren, and one great-grandchild celebrates the holiday each year smack in the middle of this spinning, blinking wonderland.
The effect is nearly impossible to describe. Every wall is covered with gauze and lights and hand-painted mountain peaks. Every surface is populated by angels and light-up miniature houses and reindeer. There are more than three hundred and fifty elves alone. Things move. Lights sparkle. Music plays. It’s like a carousel that has spun off its base.
The project started modestly, twenty-five years ago, when the couple simply hung up some crepe paper. Now they’ve built a wing dedicated exclusively to Coca-Cola-related Christmas items. “We started looking at things in the stores,” says Old Lady Pundt. “We started building.” Her husband chimes in, “We bought a Santa Claus, a Danbury, a solid, not a porcelain. From there, every year we got something else and something else.” The wife interrupts (they talk like this, one after the other, back and forth, adding here and there, just as they decorate their home): “And we’d get stuff for Christmas from our kids. We don’t like clothes or anything. We like toys.” Most of it comes from Menards and Lowe’s, she says—“Anyplace that sells Christmas.”
A visitor might wonder how the two, who are now reaching their seventies, manage to live in a fully transformed Christmas House three months out of the year with only a bed, a dining table, a couple of easy chairs, and a big-screen TV as remnants of a more routine, non-Christmas life. But for the Pundts, the season really begins in August, while it’s still hot and green outside. That’s when they start pulling down boxes and stringing lights. And because some of the Christmas trees are too giant to stash away, they sit year-round in various corners, wrapped in plastic. “It’s just ordinary to us,” says Old Lady Pundt. “It’s just common.” Adds the Mr., “Everybody, our friends who come, the big question is, when we go in the bedroom: ‘You sleep in here?’”
Old Lady Pundt confesses that she was the driving force behind the emergence of the Christmas House. The couple met in high school, on a bus in Iowa Falls. They became sweethearts, married, and moved to State Center, where they owned a Jack & Jill grocery store for thirty-four years. “This started as a hobby to get us away from the store’s problems,” she says.
“At the start, I was a humbug,” says Old Man Pundt.
His wife explains. “After he got in to start helping me, then he got to be more Christmassy.”
“I had to,” he adds.
Old Man Pundt’s darling project, the thing that cemented his interest in the red and green, is an expansive light-up village, complete with gas stations, country stores, farms, and even a firehouse. The installation expresses his love of fire engines and also his passion for building things. With a MIDI version of “Jingle Bells” backing him up, he describes the town’s support structure. It is, he says, anchored by an old wooden buffet and a glass showcase. He reaches in, a little stiffly, to straighten a miniature streetlight, noting that burned-out bulbs drive him crazy. “We check all the light bulbs before we put them up,” he says. “We check them after. We go by layers. We start at the top and work our way down and we check as we go.”
Both agree that Old Lady Pundt is the motivator in the family, while Old Man Pundt is the perfectionist, the detail man. As a team, they repair, restore, build, and create—those snow-capped mountains, palm trees for manger scenes, shelves and pedestals, night skies that can be put away whole, which is something to consider with so many elaborate displays. “She gets herself in trouble once in a while,” he says. To which she responds, “He thinks everything out. I suppose that’s good in a way. We don’t let things sit. We buy something and we fix it and we put it up or put it away. We don’t leave things goofy.”
Old Lady Pundt breaks into a grin. “He couldn’t do it without me and I couldn’t do it without him.”
“And I wouldn’t,” he says, with feigned exasperation.
In the bedroom corner, next to the bathroom with the Christmas wallpaper and furry Santa toilet-seat cover, a truly unique facet of the Pundt style emerges. A lit-up nativity scene with tiny sheep and homemade palm trees sits on a table. Above it, as if in heaven, if heaven were a shelf, Santa and Mrs. Claus keep watch. Beneficently, they look down on Mother Mary, who mechanically swings the baby Jesus in her arms to the tune of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” which plays on an endless loop. “We try to make scenes out of things,” says Old Man Pundt, fiddling with an electric socket. His wife adds,
“It would be boring if you just set them down. It just wouldn’t be pretty.”
Her favorite items are a pair of moving statues that are dressed in white and hold candles. They are Father Christmas and the Ice Queen. “I have one hundred and fifty animateds,” she says. “I like them. But if they quit, I don’t care. They become stationaries, like this guy here.” Old Lady Pundt strokes the hair of an elegant, white-cloaked Santa. “He don’t move, he just lights up. He’s one of my newer pieces and I think he’s just beautiful.” Nor does the couple get startled at night, searching the darkness for a glass of water, by an army of animateds looming silently, eyes open. “We don’t leave it on all the time,” says Old Man Pundt. “We run it when people are here and then we shut it off.” Says the Mrs., “It’s just as pretty one way as the other.”
At the Pundt house, Santas outnumber Jesuses by a wide margin. (“We’re not big religious people,” she says, “but I still believe.”) And Coke products outnumber those from Pepsi, which are relegated to a small basement display. This was installed after the couple’s grandson took a job with the company. The Coca-Cola room, as it has come to be known, is bedecked with a shiny black-and-white checkered floor, a five-foot-tall Santa and Mrs. Claus, antique gas pumps, a series of enormous Christmas trees, and a human-scale but non-functional soda fountain that Old Man Pundt built himself. “I always kind of collected Coca-Cola,” says Old Lady Pundt. “I’m a red person. I like bright things that give me a lift. I hate dark things that don’t give you a lift. But I always had my Coke stuff all boxed u
p. And then we hired a contractor.”
“Because we used to have a deck out here,” interjects Old Man Pundt.
“I hated that deck,” says his wife.
She also has no use for windows. The Coca-Cola room has just one, to suit fire codes. “It’s covered up over there,” she points. “The contractor said we needed it in case I had to jump out of it in a fire. I don’t need no windows. They just take up my space.”
Because the house is brimming over, the Pundts are considering a Morton outbuilding for the yard, where they could arrange an additional display of gas-station memorabilia and also a whole new roomful of Christmas toys. “Collecting keeps your mind active,” says Old Lady Pundt. “You think of one thing and it gives you another idea and another idea and pretty soon you’re”—she makes the sound of a jet roaring off. “It’s a mission.” Christmas, she adds, is the ideal focus for a curious mind and a mirthful heart. “Christmas makes you all…it’s something inside you. You can’t explain it. It’s, I suppose, love. Love of people. It just makes you want to bubble all over.”
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