Loges and his wife, Amy (who came up with the message), created this special lights display in response to the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the community. For the past three decades, Loges and his family have crafted clever, typically religious, messages in lights for each holiday season. This year, though, the family decided to change things up with a heartwarming message to anyone passing by their home.
“This year, I had decided that we needed to reach out to everybody and have a message that was not oriented toward a particular faith,” Thomas Loges said. “We decided to go with this message because it’s addressing a major issue, not only in the neighborhood, but in the country.”
Credit: Thomas Loges
Credit: Thomas Loges
In November, Loges set out to create the message on the fence that borders his home. In total, Loges used over 100 strands of lights to construct block letters that appear on this fence. The process took a few weeks to complete.
“There are 170 boards on the fence,” said Loges. “The average letter size is five boards, with a board and a half in between each letter and four or five boards in between each word.”
In the past few weeks, a few of Loges’ neighbors have made it a point to thank him for his thoughtful message, stating its impact on them during what is obviously a difficult time for many.
“Somebody came to the house this year who lives off of Shiloh Springs,” Loges said. “I wasn’t home, but he talked to my daughter and said that he really appreciated the messages every year, but that this year, the message was particularly meaningful to him.”
Both Loges, who works as a manufacturer’s representative, and his wife, who works in international diversity training, have been affected by the pandemic. Due to the nature of their work, Loges and his wife have seen a decline in business. It’s this struggle, also faced by so many others, that eventually inspired him to create a message of hope to display outside his home.
The pandemic “has certainly affected our lives as well,” Loges said. “That’s another reason why we wanted to put up the message. I wanted to change the message to healing, because healing is what we really need as a country, and not just from COVID. We also need to do a lot of social healing.”
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