Dr. Bill’s Rx for 2020: sharing the lights of Christmas
By Laura Longley
William “Dr. Bill” Incatasciato is a Loudoun County pediatrician who, besides specializing in the care of children, remains a child at heart. And there’s no time of year when that’s more evident than Christmas because that’s when the lights come on.
“Ever since I was a little kid,” he recalls, “my family and I would enjoy looking at Christmas displays in our neighborhood. Most homes up and down the street were draped in various colorful lights. Back then, it was fairly simple. There were two types of lights, the large red, blue, and green C9s and the ‘newer’ white mini lights. Some homes even had molded plastic figures of various Christmas themes.”
As the years went by, displays became more and more elaborate—some synchronized to music played on a radio frequency, animated displays, and inflated Santas, reindeer, sleighs, and elves. And there were those houses with so many lights piled on them that surely astronauts could see them from the International Space Station.
When he lived in Fairfax, Dr. Bill and his wife would make the rounds of neighborhood displays with the invaluable assistance of a website called Holly’s Tacky Christmas Lights. But after moving to Loudoun, when the couple started out to view the lights, they had no map to guide them to the best and the brightest. So, in 2017 he started a Facebook page—Loudoun Christmas Lights—complete with a map.
What Bill Incatasciato has learned as the page and community enthusiasm have grown to 100 posts and 8,000 followers is just how much the real delight of the season comes from enjoying one another’s creativity. And at no time in recent memory has that been truer that this year of COVID-19, Zoom video conferencing, and divisive politics.
To relieve yourself of stress and anxiety this holiday, Dr. Bill’s 2020 tour of Loudoun’s lights might be just the right medicine. “The light displays and tours of them,” he says, “help us take a brighter view of the future and make us realize that things will get better.”
Everyone is invited to participate in Loudoun Christmas Lights by:
- liking, following, and sharing the page,
- sending photos and locations of light displays, and
- visiting the displays and appreciating the effort put into them.
To access the gallery of displays and maps to them, visit the Loudoun Christmas Lights Facebook page at https://facebook.com/LoudounChristmasLights/. There you can view a gallery of decked-out homes and find them on a Google map where you can also organize your personal driving tour.
“The magic of the displays isn’t who made them or why, but that when we look at them, we get to enter a world of imagination,” as Dr. Incatasciato reminds us with a song from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory:
Come with me and you’ll be
In a world of pure imagination
Take a look and you’ll see
Into your imagination
We’ll begin with a spin
Travelling in the world of my creation
What we’ll see will defy explanation . . .