Every fall, Magnolia Green's Social Committee puts out a real calendar. There's a farmers market that runs through October, a Fall Festival at Arbor Walk, a Home for the Holidays weekend where builders open model homes for tours with hot cocoa and a trolley. It's organized, sponsored, and printed in the resident newsletter months in advance.
None of that is what actually pulls cars down Nicklaus Circle in December.
The neighborhood's most talked-about holiday sight is not run by the HOA, not sponsored by a builder, and not on any newsletter. It's one family's yard, decorated according to a rule book that was written thirty years ago and thirty minutes down the road, before Magnolia Green had a single house in it.
A Losing Streak in Brandermill Started All of This
The tradition belongs to Hunter and Emily Bottoms, and it didn't start in Magnolia Green at all. It started in 1995, when Hunter's father and his two siblings began decorating their home in Brandermill specifically to win that neighborhood's annual lights competition. According to Hunter's own account, they lost for years before finally taking the title with what he still calls barely more than a participation prize.
The family kept at it anyway, and by 2014 the display had grown large enough to win USA Today's recognition for best private light display in the country. That kind of attention creates its own problem. The crowds got so large that visitors reportedly had to park blocks away and walk in, because the street itself couldn't absorb the traffic. Hunter eventually moved the whole operation to Magnolia Green, where he now runs it with Emily and their four daughters.
The scale hasn't shrunk in the move. Nearly 100,000 lights now cover the house and yard at 7519 Nicklaus Circle, synchronized in the tradition of the bigger commercial displays around the region. Setup reportedly starts as early as September, months before the first bulb is switched on, with the display's first official lighting each year falling on Thanksgiving night. As Emily Bottoms put it in an interview with a local news station, "we've become a part of a lot of family's traditions now."
When a Front Yard Charity Outgrows a Front Yard
The part most drive-by visitors probably don't know is that the display doubles as a fundraiser. The Bottoms family has partnered with Worthdays, a charity that supports local children in the foster care system, turning their yard into an entry in a competition against more than 20 other houses and communities to see who can raise the most money for the cause. In one past year, that competition brought in more than $1,500 for Worthdays.
That detail changes what the display actually is. It isn't just an elaborate hobby that got out of hand. It's a private household that has, over three decades and one move across the county, built something closer to a small annual nonprofit event, run entirely on its own initiative and without a homeowners association behind it.
One Stop on a Much Bigger Route
Here's the piece that makes this more than a nice local story. Richmond has its own long-running regional institution built around exactly this kind of house: the Tacky Light Tour. It's a decades-old tradition where families across the area compete, informally, to put on the most over-the-top holiday display, and where tour operators run limos and buses through the region every night from Thanksgiving weekend through New Year's specifically to see them. One tour operator describes the route as running through Chesterfield, Midlothian, and Henrico, the same swath of the metro area Magnolia Green sits in off Hull Street Road, and notes that homeowners on the circuit typically start preparing months in advance, sometimes as early as September, which lines up exactly with what the Bottoms family says about their own timeline.
Local roundups of the best Tacky Light Tour stops have named the Magnolia Green home specifically, describing a house covered edge to edge in lights, synchronized to music broadcast over FM radio for cars parked outside, with a few decorations carried over from Hunter's father's old house on Long Hill Road in Brandermill worked into the display as a quiet nod to where all of this started.
So when someone in Magnolia Green tells a neighbor to drive down Nicklaus Circle in December, they're not describing a neighborhood decoration. They're pointing to one address inside a much older, much bigger regional tradition, one that most of Richmond already organizes entire evenings around without necessarily knowing that a stop on it sits inside their own subdivision.
What This Looks Like If You Live Here
For residents planning around it, the practical version is simple:
- The display is at 7519 Nicklaus Circle, Moseley, VA 23120, inside Magnolia Green off Hull Street Road.
- Lights typically go up starting in September, with the first official lighting on Thanksgiving night, running through the rest of the holiday season.
- The display supports Worthdays, a charity serving local children in foster care, as part of a fundraising competition against other houses and communities in the region.
- It sits within the broader footprint of Richmond's Tacky Light Tour, which covers Chesterfield, Midlothian, and Henrico, so it's worth pairing a visit with other stops on the same circuit rather than treating it as a single stand-alone drive-by.
None of that competes with the neighborhood's official calendar. The Social Committee's fall market and the builders' Home for the Holidays weekend are still happening on their own schedule, aimed largely at people who don't live here yet. What happens on Nicklaus Circle is a separate thing entirely, started by one family for reasons that had nothing to do with Magnolia Green and everything to do with a losing streak in another neighborhood three decades ago.
That's arguably the more honest measure of a place. Not the amenities a developer builds in, but what residents choose to keep doing on their own, long after the marketing calendar moves on to the next season.
If you're weighing a move to Magnolia Green, or already live here and want to know what else makes this stretch of Chesterfield County tick beyond the golf course and the pool schedule, Mike Lonski covers the neighborhood in detail, house by house and season by season. Reach out anytime you're ready to talk about buying, selling, or just understanding what a specific address here is actually worth.
