Mr. Christmas (2012) - full transcript

[recording]
Oh, beautiful for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea.
There!

There! Over there!

Get that one!

There we go. All right, we're on.



We're on.

My name is Bruce Mertz and
the people around here call me Mr. Christmas.

This is my 31st year of putting up the lights.

I've been living here since 1977 and, uh...

every year I start setting up at the end of August.

Takes me about 3 months.

Oh, I just go from one thing
to another thing 'cause I know

if I just do one thing a day,
I'm going to get it done.

Most of the commercial lights
fade out over time,

so I've developed my own paint
that does not fade.

The lights that I've used it on have lasted
something like 12, 13 years without ever fading.

I gotta heat up the insulation
so it's pliable.

Right now it's kind of stiff.

I started with a string of lights around the house.



My neighbor across the street told me that...

when I moved in here, "You gotta add
something new every year," you know?

"That's what we do around here."

So over the years, I've added something every year...

And he hasn't added anything.

He's still got same string of little C9 bulbs
from 40 years ago, and...

while he sits in the house and
looks through his picture window

at this beautiful light display
across the street.

So he knows how to work things.
[chuckles]

[cat meows]
You want me to brush you down?

Aw, heck.

- You wanna see this girl do a trick?
- [cameraman] Sure.

I'll show you a trick. Maybe she won't
do it anymore, but let me see.

[cat complains]

Okay?
There we are.

- [cameraman] Is that...?
- That's her trick.

Right, Trixie?

Oh.

[ratchet squeaking]

Well, I first met Bruce at the, uh...
AJ's Bar & Grill.

I used to play liar's dice down there

and the guy liked to play liar's dice,
so I met him whilst playing liar's dice.

Sitting next to Mr. Christmas
is a good spot.

I get lotsa hugs.

[music]

How 'bout that, buddy?

The first night I turn 'em on
is on Thanksgiving night.

That's a happy holiday.

Christmas is a happy holiday.

New Year's Eve is a happy holiday.
So I go on to the 2nd of January.

Here we go.

When I start the lights at night,
I have a CD with the National Anthem

I mean, "God Bless America."

So at, uh, two minutes and ten seconds
before six o'clock

I put on the music
[music begins]

and then as the applause
dies down, I got all my timers...

I got 14 timers, all supposed to
come on at the same time

and then I go in and I have a CD
with all banjos playing Christmas tunes.

and that's the start of the evening.

[applause, kids cheering]

- Merry Christmas!
- Mr. Christmas!

[banjo music]

So I go out about every 15, 20 minutes.

Greet them for the evening.

I'll hand out photographs to 'em.

Every season now for the last 4 or 5 years,
I've gone through about 4,000 photos.

They usually ask about three questions
that I've put the answers to

on a little label and put it
on the back of the photograph.

[happy crowd noises]

- Uh-ho-ho!

- Can I see? Can I see?

- I wanna see!
- Haahhh!

- Oh my gosh!
- Can I see?

- Coool!

[kids] Merry Christmas!

Bye!

[banjo music continues]

Actually, I told you I had a lot of fun
watching the people on the red carpet.

- Especially the kids.
- Yeah.

- They're either chasing the lights
back and forth on the red carpet

or else they're rolling down the hill.
It is... [laughs]

... hilarious.

"Can I come inside?"
I says, "There's nothing inside!

"I mean, there's nothing.
It's just, you know, my cat!

"That's all there is, is my cat."

- Hi, Trixie.
[cat complains]

[banjos: "Up on the Housetop"]

Ha, ha, ha!
[cameraman laughs]

[Randy] He's no Fred Astaire.

- All right. Well, we'll see you tomorrow.
- Okay.

- Thank you!
- Bye.

[Randy] What was that, Bruce?
You didn't say that, did you?

[cameraman laughing]
- I didn't say that. Did I say that?

[all laughing]

[TV reporter]
His neighbors call him Mr. Christmas

and every night at 6 pm sharp

he flips a switch...
- Mr. Christmas.

[Randy, on TV] His mind is so active,
it is impossible for him to stop working.

[Bruce, on TV] People ask me,
where do you buy all this stuff?

I say, you can't buy it.
I say, I built it all myself.

[singing] I wish you a Merry Christmas,
I wish you a Merry Christmas

I wish you a Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year.

[banjos: "Deck the Halls"]

[electrical buzzing, clicking]

[piano]

This is a sequencer
I bought for $2 in 1978.

These relays here are mounted
on two fry pans that I bought from K-Mart.

And I'm using them for a heat sink.

There's 20 microswitches on here.

Each one of these little plastic plugs
intercepts a switch.

I've got it programmed so that the lights
chase around the house in blocks of eight.

[saxophone and drums]

I never got into lights until I moved here.

I grew up out in South Dakota.

I was the youngest of 10.

We didn't have
electricity then on the farm,

and I'd never seen any electric lights
or anything like that.

We were not necessarily
that rich, you know,

and so presents were kind of few
and far between there, during Christmas.

I have a joke about South Dakota.

South Dakota's the Ever-Never Land.

If you ever leave, you never come back.

I left to join the Air Force.
The first time I ever rode on a train,

the first time I ever rode on a bus.

I went to Fort Warren, Wyoming
for electrician's school.

That was my first experience
with lights, colored lights.

If someone come along and
took their hand like that

and dragged all the wires out of the way,

I wouldn't know what to do
because I have no circuit design here.

It was all done in my head.

There's add-ons and jury-rigged,
lot of hours

if I keep my hands off it
and everything's okay.

[music]

[music fades]

[cat meows, purrs]

Nellie was very interested in Christmas.
She loved Christmas.

She used to go to church
and tell Christmas stories.

She was so good at it,
she'd have the kids in tears, you know...

[laughs]

...the way she described everything,
you know.

But then we, uh...

Uh, we lacked one week
of being married ten years.

It was a childhood cancer that
she had acquired, but it was for an adult.

She, uh, well she died about 18 months
after she had got it, got the disease.

And then, uh, I continued to go to work.

And I retired from the...
retired from the civil service in '94.

I realized I had a life to live and I, uh...

What am I going to do? And I says, well,
best thing I can do is just, uh, do lights.

You know, just keep on
doing lights, you know?

That way it kept me busy but also
allowed me to be able to entertain people

and have them become
happy with it, you know.

Which in turn made me happy.

We had a very up and down
emotional day last... last Monday.

I was sitting in the garage here

and my friend Randy was sitting
right over here next to me

And I'm looking out the door
across the street and I could see the...

the garbage truck coming
around the corner - a big garbage truck

it was going about 45 miles an hour -
way fast. The speed limit's 25.

This big flash of brown went up
in the air like that and...

and killed a cat.

I said, Randy - go see if that's Trixie.

I can't face it, you know.

[Randy] And I came back to the garage
and I said to Bruce...

"I'm sorry."

So I went over there and picked up Trixie
and I brought her back and

put her in the back yard.

We took turns digging a hole.

Cut a sheet and put Trixie in it.

We both had tears in our eyes doing this.
So we lowered it in the hole and...

put the sheet over the top of it.

So I went back out here
in the garage and sat down

tears still streaming down my face.

Randy was in here, he was...

tears streaming down, too.

And all sudden, I look over

and Trixie walks in!

He says, well look -
look, there's Trixie!

I looked around, I said,
oh, my god, there's Trixie!

I thought I was seeing a ghost!

And he's, oh, wow!
He just hollered out loud and...

when all that noise came,
well she just took off, right?

We couldn't find her again.

I thought, well, that was unbelievable.

I don't believe that happened.

And Randy said, "I'll go look for her."
I said,

"That's just an apparition.
You didn't see it."

So then he finally found her,
and come back out here.

And then, I got to thinking,

oh, my neighbor's cat
looks just like Trixie.

But when I went out to pick up Trixie,

I didn't have any thought that
it would be somebody else's cat.

And I says, "Frank,"

I says, "Why don't you sit down here."

And I told him, I says, "You know -

"I think that your cat is buried
out on the back yard here."

He says, "I don't know
how I'm going to tell my wife."

I says, "Well, good luck."

I says, "I'm sorry.

"But I'll tell you one thing -

"You won't have to do too much grieving
'cause we did all the grieving for you."

[music]

- [Randy] Bye, Santa!
- [Bruce] Bye!

See you next year.

Hope you don't wear out your arm,
waving at people.

There he goes, there he goes.

[Randy] Don't do it! Stay on!

[Bruce] So, we gotta go in
and turn the rest of this stuff off.

[Randy] Well, leave 'em on for a little bit.

- What?
- Leave it on.

- Okay. If you like.

Hi, Trixie
[meows]

Yeah, how are you?

After the lights go off
and it's rather dismal...

... you know, I mean...

...golly sakes, where did all the fun go?
You know what I mean?

And once I back to the idea that
I gotta take this stuff down

well, then it's just a normal part
of the cycle of Christmas...

New Year's...

Easter...
July... summer...

[music]

closed captions: Iladi Elladi