More than 29 miles of wire. More than 500,000 lights. More than 70,000 visitors. Move over, Clark Griswold: You have nothing on David Richards, the Australian lawyer who has just broken the Guinness World Record for the most number of Christmas lights used to decorate a single home. (And also, presumably, the record for the world's most extreme energy-usage spike, and for the most hours spent wearing sunglasses at night, and for the most enraged neighbors.)
This will actually be the second time that Richards—husband of Janean, father of Aidan, 13, Caitlin, 10, and Madelyn, 6—has been a Guinness luminary (sorry!). In 2001, the Richards family set the then-record for holiday home-lighting with a Griswoldian 331,038 lights. That relatively long-standing record was broken last year, however, by the Gay family of LaGrangeville, New York, who decorated their house with 346,283 lights, many of them synchronized to music.
And then? It was on.
"It was sort of a reason to do it again," Richards told the U.K. paper Metro of his record's Yankee challenge. Plus, "they didn’t break it by very much."