The holiday decorating at 77 Shrewsbury Avenue isn’t done yet. (Photo by Dustin Racioppi; click to enlarge)
By DUSTIN RACIOPPI
There’s no shortage of Christmas spirit at Natividad Oliveras’s Red Bank home. Just a shortage of real estate.
If you’ve seen her Shrewsbury Avenue residence, you understand.
The front yard is a tightly packed tableau of holiday cheer, with candy canes hanging from her fence and an array of biblical characters, snowmen, Santa Clauses, reindeer and toy soldiers staked in just about every available patch of grass she owns.
“We’re not even done yet,” Oliveras said.
Natividad Oliveras outside her home. (Photo by Dustin Racioppi; click to enlarge)
In her 15 years living on Shrewsbury Avenue, Oliveras has amassed an attic-sized arsenal of lawn ornaments and decorations. Because Christmas is her favorite holiday, she likes to put them to good use.
As many as she can fit in her yard will, too. Oliveras said she still needs to hang icicle lighting around her house and plant more candy canes and a lighted spiral tree in the yard.
Though she did not register for the borough’s home decorating contest, which will be judged this weekend, Oliveras takes pride in her decorating, if only to turn heads of passersby or give her neighbors across the street at the Red Bank Senior Center something to look at.
“They like to look over at night, so I do it so they can enjoy it, too,” she said.
Oliveras said she has somewhere between 500 and 600 Christmas decorations she’s collected over the years, and most of them have been assigned to the walls of her two-bedroom home, leaving viewers with just a glimpse of her collection.
“If (the front yard) was bigger, there’d be more stuff,” she said.
