Meet America's Most Extreme Holiday Decorators and Their Festive Collections

From collections that have outgrown their homes to custom couture Santas that cost a small fortune, the holiday decorators featured on Hoarding for the Holidays are like nothing you have ever seen before.

Honestly, Brandon’s infectious smile and sweet disposition remind us of an elf. Brandon has what he might call a collection (and what others might call an obsession) with blow-mold yard decorations. Blow molds are hollow plastic figures with lights inside them. They were invented in the 1950s and were popular because they are lightweight and durable; however, since they’re large, they can be difficult to store. For this reason, a typical homeowner’s collection might include just a few holiday blow molds. But Brandon’s is anything but typical.

Brandon’s garage, under-deck storage area and multiple (that’s right, MULTIPLE) garden sheds are filled with his astonishing collection of more than 2,000 blow molds. Yet, Brandon is still always on the hunt for more. As a first-grade teacher with a tight budget, Brandon is a pro thrift shop picker, dumpster diver and curb collector, referring to garbage day as “second Christmas.”

On the complete opposite side of the spectrum is Mario. Mario is to Christmas what Tom Ford is to fashion. He is serious, and he is expensive. “My Christmas decorating style, it’s like couture clothing,” he explains. And he means this quite literally. Every year, Mario commissions an artist to create bespoke Santas that cost upward of $1,000 each. Mario then creates over-the-top displays in his home that he reveals live on social media under his self-given title, The Official King of Christmas.

The artist who makes Mario’s custom, couture Santas is kept so confidential that no one, including his partner, Bill, knows who she is. “Nobody gets to meet her … she is my Santa,” he explains to Bill after telling him that it won’t just be the camera crew waiting in the car while he picks up this year’s Gucci-clad creation.

Of course, the holiday madness, er magic, isn’t limited to just Christmas, and that’s where Flo comes in. Flo has a love for Hanukkah that shines as bright as those miraculous menorah candles, and her friends and family look forward to her Menorah Madness Hanukkah party all year long.

With a basement filled with everything one can imagine, including several things you can’t (a faucet adapter that turns your water blue, perhaps?), Flo takes those eight crazy nights pretty seriously. For the last 40 years, she has been hosting a Hanukkah party that has become legendary within her New Jersey community.

Meet Nick, as in “Jolly ‘Ol Saint.” Nick (left) was born on Christmas Day (yes, really), so it seems he was destined to be the holiday enthusiast that he most decidedly is.

Nick works in construction. As a side hustle, he collects and refurbishes Christmas decor that he sometimes sells — but appears to mostly keep for himself. Nick’s collection is large enough to decorate four acres of land. If it’s hard to gift-wrap your head around how much stuff that is, we’ll put it this way: He has a barn that he uses to store his holiday decorations. If empty, this barn could be used to park 19 cars. We’ll let that sink in for a moment.

Dominick, pictured here with his bewildered husband, Matt, puts the "mass" in "Christmas." His 2,500-square-foot basement, which serves as his main storage space, is his version of Santa’s workshop. There is a literal army of nutcrackers standing sentry in the space, along with Dominick’s collection of over 70 wreaths, 100-plus artificial trees and over two miles worth of twinkle lights.

Dominick begins decorating his and Matt’s beautiful Nyack, New York, home months before the holidays to prepare for their Christmas party, where they generally host more than 200 people. The pièce de résistance is usually their massive central tree that will have over 10,000 lights and 2,000 ornaments once completed.

Sweet, smiling Hope makes her living as a special education teacher and also has a pretty serious side hustle as a holiday bargain hunter. She has a keen eye for finding obscure, vintage Christmas decor at estate and garage sales, buying them for a song and reselling them for a profit. This lets her call her obsession an investment. Clever, eh?

While spinning the truth about why she needs to own 200 holiday blow molds or why she bought an entire lot of Christmas decor that cost more than she had in her checking account might not land her on the naughty list, Hope’s dad, well, hopes she can turn this hobby into a more professional business. “If you're going to make that kind of profit, then we’ve got to get organized,” he tells his daughter.

“Do people do that in real life?” she asks like a child staring with amazement at magically filled stockings on Christmas morning.

In the great state of Texas, Kandace has self-diagnosed herself with “obsessive Christmas disorder.” She decorates her family’s home to the extent that you can hardly use the kitchen and the dining room for close to nine months out of the year! It’s all for a good cause, though, as they welcome guests as part of a tour of homes that raises money for charity.

They say everything is bigger in Texas, and apparently, that includes the cost of artificial Christmas trees. This year, Kandace has her heart set on a tree with a whopping $5,000 price tag! Lucky for her, her patient husband Ricardo’s heart is just as big as their credit card bill. He subscribes to the age-old adage, “Happy wife, happy life.”

Chelsea and Bryan are best friends, roommates, business partners and self-proclaimed co-dependent Christmas enablers. They're who you call when you want the kind of over-the-top holiday display that can only be found in the town where neon lights and tinsel are a year-round staple … Las Vegas, baby!

Chelsea and Bryan’s holiday staging and decor business, aptly named Santas Helpers, requires 27 storage units that are filled with holiday decorations. One unit alone houses a collection of over 10,000 ornaments. This year, Bryan and Chelsea are bringing that big energy magic they typically reserve for their clients into their own home, creating a whimsical candy shop-themed display that is anything but subtle.

Erick is a lifelong Christmas enthusiast who has been decorating for the holidays since he was the ripe old age of 11. His family says that as a child, he received decorations as a gift every year, setting the stage for his future Christmas-display-obsessed self.

It takes three months for Erick to set up his incredible Lights on Hiawatha holiday display that he opens to the public just after Thanksgiving. The full walk-through experience is filled with his massive 1,000-piece blow-mold collection, huge faux window display vignettes, a Ferris wheel and enough Christmas lights to be seen from airplanes flying overhead.

Christa has a love for Christmas that may only be matched by her love for her fiancé, Pete. She has a collection of 32 decorated trees that stay up from October to January in their Florida home. Christa is so dedicated to the holiday that she even saves up her vacation days every year to ensure she can take a full week off just to decorate said home.

Pete describes his fun-loving fiancée as “the wild, crazy creative one,” so he didn’t even bat an eye when Christa merged her Halloween skeletons (affectionately named Norm and Dave) with her Christmas decor. “They add a little spooky and a lot of humor,” she explains.

Who knew that decorating for Christmas could also land you in the Guinness Book of World Records? Apparently, Jon from Queens, New York, knew. He holds the world record for the largest gingerbread display in the world. His 2017 record-breaking display featured a staggering (and yet to be broken) 1,251 cookie buildings.

Jon has turned his world record into a full-blown business, creating gingerbread displays that take a full year to plan, design, build, bake and decorate. Every piece of his displays is edible, and each one can contain around 100,000 square feet of cookie villages.

What better way to close out this jaw-dropping menagerie of extreme holiday decorators than to end with legendary Frank “Ms Las Vegas” Marino? Frank, a prolific female impersonator in Las Vegas known for his long-running drag performance of Joan Rivers, has a love for Christmas that could make Liberace’s love for sequins seem subtle. He has been known to spend over $100,000 on a single tree.