Think your holiday decor is over the top? Check out this guy’s tree

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, Bruce Kern began hitting up all of his friends with vans.

It takes quite a fleet to transport 97 large Rubbermaid boxes containing 2,500 Christmas ornaments from a storage unit on Brook Road to Kern's home on Hanover Avenue in Richmond's Fan District.

One morning last week, as friends hauled empty containers out of the house, the decorating still wasn't complete. Almost every space in the buttery-yellow living room and adjacent dining room held ornaments awaiting a spot on the tree.

"I'm up to 1,600," sighed Kern at one point during the decorating, glancing up at the artificial 10-foot fir -- already so covered in decorations that barely any green was visible.

Overkill? Absolutely. "Now that I have so many, it looks good to overdo it," he said.

Kern, who's lived in the house with Peekapoos Belle and Beau for a year and a half, has collected ornaments for 30 years. About 70 percent are Christopher Radko European glass ornaments, which Kern began buying when the company started 23 years ago.

The tree, centered in front of the living room's bay window, "looks like a glass jewel when it's done," Kern said. The towering mass, illuminated by 2,200 lights, encompasses almost every category imaginable: Santas and traditional Christmas fare, vehicles, dogs, Disney, Wizard of Oz, martini glasses, palm trees, nursery rhymes, Buddhas, "I Love Lucy's" candy-packing fiasco, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, even a Chinese-food carton.

Kern begins decorating the tree from the trunk out. "The ornaments I don't like, I put inside," he said.

He loses a couple to breakage every year -- a costly slip, considering that Radko ornaments run about $30 to $120 and many are retired every year, driving up value to collectors. "When I drop one, I stop and go do something else because it means I'm getting tired and careless," he said, as Belle's wagging tail brushed precariously against a delicate, low-hanging ornament.

It takes most of January to dismantle the tree. "You're not as enthusiastic," Kern said.

He also goes shopping in January for new ornaments. His favorite haunts for after-Christmas sales are Kelley's Gift Shop on Patterson Avenue, Schwarzschild Jewelers and Old World Accents in Carytown.

His ornament fascination makes it easy for Kern's friends and family to shop for him.

"As you get older, people don't know what to get you for Christmas, and what they get you tends to stay in a closet and go out into a yard sale sometimes," Kern said, laughing. "I ask people to give me a Christmas ornament. It's nice because then you think of the person when you open them."
Contact Julie Young at (804) 649-6732 or .