Peteyville founder’s love of Christmas extends to arm tattoos: ‘I’m going to take it to the grave’

HAMMOND — Pete Basala’s love of Christmas may very well be visible to pilots flying to Midway and O’Hare airports.

Thousands of lights, giant inflatables and handmade holiday decorations — like a Ferris wheel filled with stuffed animals — adorn his popular Peteyville Christmas display, which sprawls across his lawn and those of four neighbors in Hammond’s Hessville neighborhood.

The extravagant, eye-popping display of giant reindeer, shivering snowmen in Victorian top hats, and whimsical nontraditional additions like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and Mr. Potato Head has drawn visitors to his home at 3033 Crane Place for decades.

Peteyville takes so much juice to run that NIPSCO set up a separate meter for it.

The decorations go all-out outside and inside Basala’s house. The interior features nine full-sized Christmas trees, custom Peteyville windows he commissioned, and Christmas eggs he gets from a Polish artisan in Lake County, Illinois. His kitchen cabinets are wrapped like presents.

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Over the years, he’s added many unusual decorations, such as a wreath chandelier over the dining table from which the Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, M&Ms and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” ornaments hang; and Christmas figurines of Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart decked out in elf outfits “on a stoop” play off Elf on the Shelf.

Some festive display occupies every corner, shelf and windowsill of the house, which is a few blocks from where “A Christmas Story” author Jean Shepherd grew up and a short way down the street from the elementary school where Flick got his tongue stuck on a flagpole.

Basala has even used his own body as a canvas to express his fondness for all things Christmas. He got his first tattoo at the age of 55, and his arms are covered with various Christmas tattoos. A cheerful tangle of colorful lights wraps around his left arm. His right arm has the Grinch, himself “looking like a deranged Easter Bunny” in the pink bunny suit from “A Christmas Story,” the Charlie Brown Christmas tree and a custom Peteyville tattoo featuring Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

“It’s to show my love of Christmas,” he said. “I want to take it to the grave.”

His Christmas spirit is widely known. Motorists often honk and shout how much they love Peteyville when passing by his truck, which has the personalized license plate PTVILLE.

“It’s an obsession,” his wife, Tina, said. “He’s obsessed.”

It’s something they joke about. A sign in the kitchen defines OCD as “Obsessive Christmas Disorder.”

They have Peteyville stocking caps and matching Peteyville letter jackets: Peyetville Pete for him, The Enabler for her.

“I do enable him,” she said. “Only one year I said no. He had his knee replaced and was in so much pain.”

Ailments like arthritis have mounted over the years. Basala said he’s slowing down a little.

“It’s a labor of love,” he said. “It’s getting hard. I’ve been thinking about downsizing, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”

It used to take 3½ hours to decorate half his lawn when he started out in 1989. He was driving around looking at Christmas decorations and was impressed by a Ferris wheel he saw on Chicago’s East Side from the Indiana Toll Road. A hobbyist woodworker, he built his own Ferris wheel that’s draped entirely in garland and lights.

Peteyville — an amalgamation of Basala’s lifelong nickname, “Petey,” and the common Ville abbreviation for Hessville — has grown to take over nearly a whole city block, showcasing more than 100 inflatables, such as Santa in an outhouse and Snoopy on top of his doghouse. The brightly lit archway, a popular photo spot, features more than 13,000 lights.

It now takes a month to set up everything — hundreds of pounds of Christmas decorations that he tries to add to every year and are stored in the off-season at storage units at “an undisclosed location” in Highland. His wife takes a week’s vacation from her hospital job to help him out.

“I’m never really finished with it,” he said. “It’s never really done.”

It takes a lot of work to maintain. He spends hours sewing up inflatables that get knocked down by the wind or downed by ice after a snowfall.

“If the weather’s bad, I don’t put the inflatables up because they get torn and the wind gusts will snap them,” he said. “But then people will complain and I’ll get a knock on the door from someone whose grandma is in town from Tennessee. I have the lights on but they ask if I can put the inflatables fully up for a few minutes. People love to tell you what to do with your money.”

The only thing that keeps Basala from retiring from his Pete’s Lawn Service company is the expense of keeping Peteyville going.

“This costs money to run,” he said.

A baker by trade, he used to run Petey Treats Espresso Cafe near the Applebee’s on Ridge Road in Munster. He got tired of dealing with rude customers and doesn’t think there’s much money in baking anymore.

“We were selling gourmet coffee when people were still going to the gas station to get a cappuccino for 39 cents out of the machine,” he said. “It’s really vicious out there. They don’t respect you at all behind the counter. They treat you like you’re not as good. Not all customers are right. Whoever thought of that idea was wrong. That’s why I like the lawn-mowing business. If somebody’s rude, I don’t have to take their $30.”

He still puts his baking to good use, making hundreds of cookies and other treats for a private, invitation-only Christmas party he hosts every year that features only sweets and booze-spiked eggnog. Decked out in a Santa suit, he greets guests who bring toys that are donated to the Shriners Hospitals for Children.

Lawn mowing also is what allows Basala to decorate two lawns on either side of his house. He mows those neighbors’ lawns for free all year so he can set up his decorations between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Many are handcrafted, wholly unique decorations, like the choir of dogs singing Christmas carols and a wisecracking Jack Frost telling Crypt Keeper-like Christmas jokes. He’s forever tinkering with it; some of the jokes were dated because they mentioned particular years and kids damaged the button by constantly mashing it too hard.

The kids love it, but one woman recently tried to claim that the animatronic Jack Frost was the devil.

“She was Reformed and sometimes they take it too far in the other direction,” he said. “You get complaints like that that are hard to explain. Most of what I hear is positive, but you still get negative comments on the Facebook page. About 99% of people enjoy it, but the 1% that don’t who kind of ruin your day.”

Social media also fueled the popularity of Peteyville, which originally drew a few hundred people every December, mostly from the surrounding Hessville neighborhood. But as people started posting photos on Facebook, Instagram and other sites, it started drawing visitors from Chicago, Michigan City, South Bend, Indianapolis, Rockford, Moline and even-more far-flung places.

“Social media made me a star,” he said. “Now it’s been covered by TV stations and radio stations from Chicago, and the newspapers.”

It in fact attracts people from all over the country and world: Many Region expatriates make a point of visiting when back home for Thanksgiving.

“People will drive an hour and a half,” he said. “We get people coming to visit family from Russia, Poland, Japan, Mexico, all over the States. People move away, go to college or meet someone and fall in love. Then they come back for the holidays and come out to see it.”

More than 1,000 people often turn out each night. Basala thinks its popularity endures because it’s old-school and unique while many Christmas displays have become computerized light shows.

“It’s one of the few you can get out and walk through,” he said.

Some people come back every night during December. Many people come back every year.

“I meet parents who brought their kids who now are bringing their own kids,” he said. “It’s more than just a Christmas display. It’s a holiday tradition.”

It means a lot to people. At least three couples have gotten engaged there. It’s helped people in dark places in their lives.

“People get suicidal during the Christmas season,” he said. “People are on the edge. They’ve told me that seeing the lights helps them get through the holiday season and gets them away from sitting home in the dark just thinking about things.”

Lines sometimes stretch down the street. The display is up from 5 to 10 nightly. It goes off at 10 p.m. sharp because it’s on a timer. Sometimes people show up late, knock on Basala’s door and ask if he can turn it back on. He jokes that he tells them he outsources the timer abroad and it would take too long to get ahold of someone at the call center.

Balasa tries to add to the display every year. This year it’s a 15-foot-tall Abominable Snowman accompanied by Yukon Cornelius and a 12-foot gingerbread man. But he wasn’t able to add as much as he would like because of capital expenses with his lawn-care business, supply-chain disruptions and a shortage of chips that power some of the moving displays — an electronic teddy bear is sidelined this winter in his garage.

“I have limited money and time and can’t do all the stuff I want to do,” he said. “Some of my ideas have to take the back shelf. I, for instance, built a train, but the track I built wasn’t big enough for it to go around. I have a strange brain where I have a lot of ideas floating around and a desire to figure out how to make it work.

“But it’s not cheap. By the time you make something like the talking dogs, you have hundreds of dollars of garbage on the floor. I’ll try something and realize it’s not going to work, so I won’t invest a lot of money and time in it.”

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Basala hopes to sustain the beloved Peteyville tradition for as long as he can and as long as his health allows.

“People love it. When I go out in my Peteyville jacket, people buy my dinner or drinks,” he said. “But after New Year’s, people forget all about me.”

Michael Gibson grew up in Hessville and has been coming to Peteyville every Christmas season for decades. He said he appreciates all the hard work Basala has put into Peteyville over the years.

“I lived a few blocks from here when I was a kid, and we’d come here every year,” he said. “Now 20 years later, I’m bringing my kids. This is an institution in Hammond, Indiana. People should come out and see it. They should come out next year if they can’t make it this year. I’d be willing to put up my own money to keep this going. But he’s still rocking.”

For more information, visit facebook.com/peteyville.in, which announces by 4:30 p.m. daily whether the inflatables will be down that night because of high winds or other inclement weather. The lights come on no matter what.

Gallery: Peteyville the Christmas display draws a global crowd Peteyville founder’s love of Christmas extends to arm tattoos: ‘I’m going to take it to the grave’

Peteyville founder’s love of Christmas extends to arm tattoos: “I’m going to take it to the grave,” Pete Basala says.