How Kauai helped Auntie Josie live forever

Come Christmastime on Kauai, Auntie Josie Chansky and her husband, Joe, turned their home into a beacon of Mele Kalikimaka spirit.

They lit it from roof to roadside, decked it with her crafts, and invited everyone on the island to stop in and enjoy it. Over some 20 years, thousands of people did. Auntie Josie’s Kapa’a home was the biggest and the best display on Kauai, and it was island-made.

Then, in 1996, Joe died and Josie gave it up. Even with help offered by friends and fans, she could not bear to transform her home again without her husband. She planned to sell it all, wreaths, trees, Ferris wheel and tableaux, at a garage sale.

Friend and fellow artist Elizabeth Freeman could not bear that. She had $3,000, she told Auntie Josie, and would buy as much of the best of her Christmas decorations as that would fetch. She would persuade county officials to find a place for the lights and the tradition.

And so she did. She needed a place and lots of plugs, she told the officials. She would provide the decorations, the volunteers, the organization, elves and candy canes. She and Auntie Josie would keep it island-fresh.

Kauai County’s leaders offered the grand lobby of the Historic County Building in Lihue. Auntie Josie offered the remainder of her collection, and in 1997 she and Freeman were in the tradition business.

They enlisted volunteers to deck that hall with the wreaths and garlands and trees that belie their origins.

Auntie Josie was a recycler. At the heart of her works were Spam cans, bottle caps, egg cartons and water bottles, all held together with generous applications of glue and glitter. She used metal coat hangers to fashion star-shaped wreaths. She cut up old beach mats to build village scenes weathered by the trade winds. She reshaped water bottles into palms, hibiscus and grass skirts for Spam cans.

Spam cans were an important element of the festival palette, and have remained so as others have carried on her tradition. A Spam can tree towers over a village scene with just enough cans to match the syllables in Monty Python’s signature tune.

As Kauai’s feral chickens have proliferated since they were set loose by Hurricane Iniki, their role in the displays has grown. They pull Santa’s sleigh in the train set. They haul his surfboard landward over big waves.

Auntie Josie and Freeman invited schools, companies, even the county jail to be a part of the fun.

Jail inmates, Freeman said, are her most stalwart volunteers. They hoist and haul trees and trestle tables. They build frameworks for the displays, proud to be part of a happy tradition.

Employees at a ranch near Princeville used beer cartons and bottle caps to make the horseshoes on their surfer cowboy tree. Students of Japanese traditions turned plastic pop bottle caps into drums and water bottles into plumeria for their origami tree. Fans of Kilauea Lighthouse sewed creatures that live under its beams: frigate birds, honu, whales and nene geese.

Until her death in February 2006, Auntie Josie was at the display every evening it was open to greet people, talk about the displays’ evolution, invite children to step into the red sleigh for a photo with the Clauses, and agree that elf-given candy canes are better than the store-bought kind.

Freeman has taken up that jolly task, and added conservation to the conversation on an island wise enough to have banned the cheap plastic grocery bags that fouled its ocean.

The indoor festival she and Auntie Josie gave Kauai has blossomed into a month of merry events, beginning with the Lights on Rice parade at 6 p.m. the first Friday of December.

After that, every weekend until Christmas, the County Building lawn lends its romance to people and parakeets. Islanders come as the sun begins to set. Some lay out picnic suppers on the lawn beneath the palms and monkey pod trees wrapped in colored lights and trimmed with dripping icicles.

As the light begins to die, hundreds of yellow-and-green parakeets take flight from Grove Farms near Koloa Town. In a great chatter, they circle the lit palms and monkey pods until they settle into their night roosts. Charmed children lie on their backs, peering up, looking for nests, and, possibly, on Christmas Eve, Santa and his team of bold chickens riding out from their base at Auntie Josie’s display.

Plan a visit

Kauai’s Festival of Lights is free; it’s typically open from 6-8 p.m. Fridays-Sundays in December through Christmas Eve. There is plenty of free parking on the Historic County Building grounds on Rice Street off the round-island Kuhio Highway in Lihue. Learn more at kauai festivaloflights.com.