Two Christmases ago, Rick Durham was unwrapping ornaments packed in newspaper with his daughters when they spied a familiar image on one of the pages — a photograph of the same Christmas decorations that were sitting out in their front yard.

A year earlier Durham, 51, had inherited an enormous collection of Christmas lights and other yard decorations from Damien Bevando, a Bend resident who’d become known for the elaborate light display he put up every December outside his Awbrey Butte home. In July 2012, Bevando died after spending five years battling Ewing’s sarcoma.

Durham and his daughters had never seen Bevando’s display in person. The photo on the crumpled up front page of a 2010 edition of The Bulletin was their first look at the legacy their family had taken on.

Bevando, the former owner of Unitel Communications Inc., spent nearly a decade expanding and perfecting the light display at his home before it was dimmed by his illness and darkened by his death. Durham, manager of the sewer district in Oregon Water Wonderland, had only encountered Bevando at running races, where his wife, Melissa, and Bevando’s wife, Erin, both competed.

Erin Bevando said she struggled to figure out what to do with her husband’s collection of decorations after his death at 52 but eventually concluded “lights aren’t meant to be kept in the dark,” and that Rick Durham was the right man to carry on her husband’s obsession.

Now, the lights brighten the holidays in Durham’s neighborhood.

At Bevando’s home in Oregon Water Wonderland south of Sunriver, a speaker broadcasts the sounds of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and the Elvis’ Christmas Album, while a family of animatronic reindeer sway their heads as though searching for grass poking up through the snow. Lights wrap around most trees up to around 18 feet — the highest Durham can reach with his telescoping pole — and a nativity scene and various inflatable snowmen and Santas fill the clearings.

As he stood on his front yard tinkering with lights inside a malfunctioning reindeer head, Durham said that while he takes a lot of pleasure in creating something his neighbors will enjoy, the attention it attracts can sometimes slow him down when he’s out in the cold troubleshooting inevitable problems.

“Sometimes I can’t even stand out here, because everybody wants to stop by to talk,” he said.

Moments later, a black SUV crept by. The window rolled down, and a woman leaned her head out.

“Looks great,” she shouted before driving on.

Growing up, Durham learned about holiday lights from his father, who trained him in the ways of Christmas decorating excess.

Durham said his dad “was a Griswold” in the spirit of the lights-obsessed father portrayed by Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation,” even going so far as to modify the electrical system at his Eugene home to handle the seasonal load.

Durham said his father’s house sat along the flight path for Eugene Airport, and one evening while the family was gathered at Christmas, a woman knocked on their door.

“She’s got the green hat, green shoes, she looked like an elf and there’s a limo out front,” he said. “She just flew in from San Diego and she’d seen the house from the airplane, and she told the limo driver she wanted to go see my dad’s house before going to a Christmas party.”

Although Durham and Damien Bevando barely knew each other, Erin Bevando said her husband would have loved knowing that his passion for bringing smiles to strangers’ faces during the holidays would live on beyond him.

“He was the right person to bequeath the lights to and all the decorations,” she said. “It had to go to someone who really, truly wanted to give the same gift. Whenever I see the lights, I think of Damien — it’s the true spirit of Christmas, the right thing to do.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0387, shammers@bendbulletin.com