You can go home for the holidays, but you can also turn your home into the holidays.
If Christmas cheer were a competition, Frankie “Christmas” Bianco would be a serious contender for the gold. The Lower East Side resident loves Yuletide to a competitive degree, and has once again transformed his one-bedroom apartment into a dazzling shrine to the season.
“Christmas is not a day, it’s a frame of mind,” Bianco, 55, told The Post, quoting Kris Kringle’s line from his top seasonal film, “Miracle on 34th Street.”
While he always goes all out — and then maintains the decorations for eight straight months — this year he outdid himself, turning his home into an even bigger indoor equivalent of the Dyker Heights lights than ever before. His over-the-top display made it once more onto the Instagram feed of documentarian Nicolas Heller, otherwise known as New York Nico, where it quickly earned some 23,000 likes from viewers.
“This year I have 12 Christmas trees and I crushed my record of lights,” he told The Post of the more than 13,000 bulbs he spent more than 200 hours stringing up around his unit immediately after Labor Day. They’ll remain on display through April. In the Instagram clip, viewers can see lights and ornaments across his ceiling, wall-mounted trees that also glitter with lights, stickers down the walls and his kitchen cabinets — and even all over his bathroom.
Bianco also added 14 pieces to his Swarovski Christmas crystal collection, got all new stickers and lights for his bedroom, and “went a little abstract” on his hallway ceiling, decorating it with spheres signed by “people who have come to my apartment.”
He also painted one wall red, and is so happy with the result that it “already has me thinking about next year,” and painting more walls different colors.
And of course, Bianco still boasts an impressive array of Christmas tattoos, including dozens of snowflake tattoos, an enormous Santa Claus on his back and more than a dozen other seasonally relevant tats. They’re difficult to miss, as he proudly shows them with his shirt off.
As for how his Christmas obsession came to be, “My love for Christmas started with my mother many years ago when she couldn’t decorate our home due to an illness so I stepped up and did it for her,” Bianco told The Post last year.
“All I ever want for Christmas is to spread a little joy into the world,” Bianco said, adding that this holiday season he’s “especially grateful that this will be in The Post as my Mom and aunts and uncles don’t quite get the internet and for them to see it in the paper means the world to me.”