Are you ready for it?
Swiftmas has returned to Naperville with a display that will leave you feeling enchanted … for the last time.
That’s right, this is the last year the family at 1228 Atlas Lane plans on decking out their home for Swiftmas.
“We’re at the end of an era with all our Taylor stuff,” said Amy Scott, who owns the house with her husband Brian.
Their two daughters, Emily and Rebecca, are crucial for building the display but since they are now home less often, it’s become a big endeavor for the couple.
“We’re not sure if we want to still do big displays but it’s the last year for this theme at least,” Scott said.
But before they shake it off and switch up their decorations, the Scotts decided to bejewel their house one last time.
“People come from all over to see our lights, which is shocking to us,” Scott, a teacher at Still Middle School in Aurora, said. “People are driving an hour, two hours, just to come in and see our display. And so we didn’t want to just stop cold turkey.”
The Swiftmas story
It’s been a tradition for the family to go all out with their Christmas decorations, but Scott said the idea to do a Taylor Swift theme came after she saw the Eras Tour concert movie in 2023. Decorations that first year included a Taylor Swift cutout from her “Lover” set in the Eras Tour and a sign that read “Karma Is The Guy On The Chiefs,” referencing Taylor Swift’s now-fiancé Travis Kelce and her song “Karma.”
Since then, the sparks flew and word of the house spread like wildfire. Thousands of people have visited the display. National news outlets like People magazine and USA Today have reported on the Scott family’s decorative efforts. Type “Swiftmas House” into Google and the Scotts’ address pops up as a “tourist attraction in Naperville, Illinois.”
The attention the family has received is beyond their wildest dreams.
Last year, the family focused on three of Swift’s albums: “The Tortured Poets Department,” “Reputation” and “Folklore.”
For their final year, the Scotts paid homage to a different set of albums. They knew they had to represent Swift’s latest album “The Life of a Showgirl.” As for the other two, the family picked “Lover” and “Midnights,” albums they had not yet focused on and that held special meaning for the family.
For Scott, the “Lover” album brought her light during the early days of the pandemic.
“I just remember listening to that album like that first weekend of the pandemic when everybody decided to do home improvement projects, and I just painted the whole basement and I just listened to ‘Lover’ on repeat,” Scott said.
As for “Midnights,” that album came out when her daughter Rebecca was looking at colleges.
“I remember the night that came out, we had woken up at 3:30 in the morning to drive to do a school visit,” Scott said. “We were listening to it on repeat over and over again as we were doing that.”
Building the display
It all starts in mid-October, when Scott says her head is clear enough to start thinking about decorating. She and her husband will listen through their selected albums a few times to start generating ideas, which they keep track of on a white board Scott used during her pandemic teaching days.
“Our brains are on fire when we are brainstorming,” Scott said.
From there, nearly every single decorative piece is crafted by the family.
“We own a printing company, so that is how we are able to do these large displays, because we make everything,” Scott said. “So we’re not we’re not buying too many things. Almost everything you see in the yard, any of those signs – we just made them.”
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For the past three years, the family has spent the night before Thanksgiving in the basement spreading glitter on their decorations (there is still glitter all over the house, Scott says).
One of Scott’s favorite decorations is this year’s Taylor Swift, who is bedazzled in purple glitter and jewels in her “Midnights” T-shirt dress from the Eras Tour.
“We put her under a stage this year, and behind her are little twinkle lights to look like they’re stars, and then there’s a sign that says, ‘Meet me at midnight,’” Scott said. “So we went a little extra with the stage this year. We have never done a stage.”
As for her husband, his favorite piece is the “Opalite” sign in “The Life of a Showgirl” section, which Scott described as his “brainchild.”
“He took an electric hand saw and like a jigsaw and just went through and carved out every single lightning strike,” Scott said. “And then we had to build a box, because we have two strobe lights inside … so we can change the colors on those strobe lights as well so they look like lightning strikes.”
Some of the items are reused from previous years. Notably, the “Folklore” cabin the family built last year was repurposed into the “Lover” house from the Eras Tour. To do that, the family had to take apart the wood to build a completely new structure. From there, they printed out the backdrops to match each room in the “Lover” house and spraypainted the wood black.
But there was one display that made Scott feel so high school — researching “Hamlet” for “The Fate of Ophelia” decoration from “The Life of a Showgirl.”
“I reviewed what the whole story is about and I wanted to make sure that we represented it well,” Scott said. “You’ll see all the cubes from (“The Fate of Ophelia”) music video. But then on top, I put the garland of flowers, because I had read that that’s how Ophelia dies, that she’s going down the river and she’s picking flowers.”
In addition to the decorations, the Scott family uses the attention their home brings to raise money for Little Friends, a Warrenville-based organization that provides services for people with autism and other developmental disabilities. On the family’s wish list for this Christmas season is to raise $10,000 for nonprofit.
“We would love it if Taylor got news of this and all of a sudden our donation was in the millions,” Scott said. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”