Miracle Workers

After decades of spreading holiday cheer, the Miracle on 34th Street tradition shines on.

- Kaitlyn Pacheco

Bob and Darlene Hosier have enough Christmas decorations to deck out four houses, top to bottom. Over the past few decades, the couple has adorned the front of their three story rowhome with countless strings of lights—along with a rotating cast of bright snowmen and wreaths, an inflatable purple hippopotamus, vintage Christmas dolls, and a handmade replica of the train garden from It’s A Wonderful Life—and hundreds of thousands of people have traveled to their home on the corner of a sleepy Hampden block to see it.

“It’s just some Christmas lights,” grumbles Bob, repeating the phrase over and over in conversation. The 62-year-old has given this response to countless people over the past few decades—reporters, grocery store clerks, documentary filmmakers—who ask him why Hampden’s Miracle on 34th Street tradition has become a local and national phenomenon that’s now woven into the narrative of Baltimore’s quirky character.

Sometimes, when Bob repeats the phrase, he pulls on the ends of his graying handlebar mustache; other times, he gently slaps the knee of his worn-in blue jeans for emphasis. It doesn’t matter how many times or in how many ways he repeats it, he says, there will always be people who don’t get it. People who question why he and his neighbors living on the 700 block of W. 34th Street spend the weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving decorating their front porches, stoops, and lawns with over-the-top holiday light displays. People who don’t understand how the residents deal with the tens of thousands of strangers who pack the block during the holiday season to take pictures of “the most outrageous Christmas lights in Maryland.” People who press them about what kind of break they get on their electric bills or whether they get paid for their appearances on HGTV, CNN, or the homepage of Bing.