Christmas display is Bellingham woman’s promise to dying mom to ‘light the way home’
Echo Stockton said her mom was her Christmas person. Together, they shopped for people and wrapped presents. They bought a Christmas tree on her mother’s birthdays, in December. They strung up Christmas lights.
“She loved Christmas. She passed that along to me. I love Christmas,” Echo Stockton said, stretching out the word so it sounded like “loooove.” “It was our time together.”
But this year, Echo Stockton doesn’t have her Christmas person.
Her mom — Fay Lyons-Stockton — died on Nov. 29 within two days of contracting pneumonia. Her immune system was weakened after receiving chemotherapy for an aggressive breast cancer and she couldn’t fight the pneumonia, according to Echo Stockton. She was 72.
In those last moments at her mom’s side, “I told her I didn’t know where she was going, but I would light the way home.”
So she did.
This year, Echo Stockton nearly doubled the number of Christmas lights she had until they totaled 35,000. She put them up on her parents’ Kansas Street house, off Electric Avenue, with the help of neighbors from across the street and her dad, Jeff Stockton.
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“I thought about her the whole time. It was kind of a therapeutic thing for me. It was keeping me busy, keeping my mind busy. I cried almost the whole time,” the 38-year-old Bellingham resident said.
Each day, from dark to 11 p.m., until Jan. 1, the lights blaze against the night, to the delight of neighbors and friends who know what Echo Stockton created for her mother on a quiet street.
“It is an achingly beautiful tribute and a stunning portrayal of love,” friend Bridget McShane said.
“It seems to me that if, in her mom’s name and memory, other people can get joy from the display, well, that is something that could help quiet the pain of missing her mom,” McShane said. “The more people that know about Fay and what a wonderful person she was, that she inspired this display, that she raised such an amazing person, the more it feels as if she’s not all the way gone.”
Fay Lyons-Stockton was born Dec. 11, 1947, in Spokane. Her family described her as a talented artist and craftswoman who opened a flower shop in Olympia in 1987 with husband Jeff.
In an obituary they plan to publish after Christmas, they said she “epitomized kindness through her intentions to listen first and talk last” and that she encouraged them to find the good in everyone.
She “will live on in the hearts of so many that knew her as a person with an enormous capacity for love and kindness,” they said.
Her survivors include her husband, Jeff Stockton; three daughters, Trudy Shuravloff, Bente Lett, and Echo Stockton; five grandchildren; and two brothers and one sister.
Echo Stockton admitted that, with her mom’s passing, she almost skipped putting up the lights this year.
It was just too much, she said, between helping to care for her mom when she was ill, a full-time job, going to school and having a toddler at home. But Echo Stockton wanted to create this year’s light show for her mom.
“My mother would want me to go on. She would want me to do the things she loved,” Echo Stockton said. “That’s how we honor her.”
Future help
Echo Stockton is considering forming a nonprofit and gaining sponsorship to create an annual Christmas light event in the future, which she hopes to name after her mom and expand to include photo sessions with Santa for low-income children.
Learn more by contacting her at Echo.stockton@gmail.com.
