Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024 | 2 a.m.
When Joey Cardona was diagnosed with lymphoma in December 2017, he started looking for ways to spread joy in the community.
Cardona and his husband, Victor Cardenas, believe that “how you feel is how you heal,” and Cardona yearned to leave something behind for people to remember him by.
That’s when the couple started acquiring Christmas trees to decorate their Henderson home at 366 S. Milan St.
Now, they have nearly 100 trees across their property — some standing tall on their own; others platformed on stands or even hung from the ceiling.
The couple decided to open their home for visitors to peek at the forest they created.
That’s now become a beloved Henderson attraction known as the “Candy Cane House,” which returned this holiday season for its fifth year and will once again be collecting donations for a local nonprofit.
Even better: Cardona, initially given two months to live, is still alive.
“Christmas is really, really good for people. It’s also bad sometimes, so if we could just share that love and spread it, I think that’s kind of the messaging that we really want to show,” Cardenas said. “(Cardona) got a second chance, so he wanted to push the message, like, how do we help other people get second chances and how do we help other people just in general, especially around the holidays?”
The Candy Cane House features more than 80 decorated Christmas trees of all sizes with at least 60,000 lights throughout the property. Each tree is adorned with colored lights and other accoutrements to match the theme planned for the various rooms in the house.
When entering the foyer, a forest of red and white lights greets guests — inspired by the hard candy for which the house was named. Visitors then make their way through a “white, wintery hallway” into the living room, where a variety of “animated” trees await them — including the Grinch tree, a music tree and the quintessential Vegas Golden Knights tree.
Cardona is the mastermind behind the tree themes while Cardenas thinks up the overall design. Each tree is designed differently every year based on the theme of the room it gets placed in.
All details are accounted for, even the smell of a room, Cardenas explained. It’s a full production that never stops being improved upon, he added.
The Candy Cane House is a free experience, but the couple does collect donations for HopeLink of Southern Nevada, an organization that helps prevent homelessness by offering eviction prevention, rapid rehousing, emergency shelter and basic needs support such as emergency food assistance and identification services.
Guests can bring cash and hygiene items or donate money using CashApp and Venmo through QR codes placed in the house, and all the proceeds get passed on to HopeLink.
Last year, the Candy Cane House gave various hygienic supplies and over $4,000 in donations to HopeLink.
Cardenas said he and Cardona liked the work HopeLink was doing and thought it was a great way to help people “get a second chance at life.”
Kristin Aviles, the chief operating officers of HopeLink, said the donations from Cardenas and Cardona “really got us through a lot of the year.”
She added that the hygiene products were especially helpful because senior citizens on fixed incomes and low-income families sometimes cannot afford items like toilet paper or shampoo when they’re having to juggle paying rent, utilities and other basic needs.
The monetary donations help HopeLink run some of its other services that aren’t covered by grant funding for rental assistance, like its identification assistance.
“I think it’s great,” Aviles said of the Candy Cane House. “HopeLink is here for the community, and so the more partners we can get, we’re buying into our mission of helping the community. It takes all of us to really be able to make a difference, so anyone who is able to get the word out of the needs of the people in this community and are able to help us get those things out to them is so appreciated.”
About 6,000 people visit the Candy Cane House each weekend, some even driving in from Arizona, California and Utah just to see the spectacle. Cardenas said they get return visitors each weekend to see what new decorations have been put up.
The Candy Cane House has become so iconic that the address shows up as “Candy Cane House” on Google Maps instead of a normal residence.
Cardenas explained that they try to maintain a great relationship with their neighbors and have implemented various strategies to minimize their traffic impact during the holidays. They aim to ensure no trash is left behind by visitors and even have a line monitor.
Cardona was recently re-diagnosed with cancer, this time battling polycythemia vera, a type of chronic leukemia. It’s a similar experience to what the couple went through with the 2017 diagnosis, but Cardenas said they’re staying positive and continuing to use the Candy Cane House as a beacon of warmth.
“Every year it gets bigger, every year it gets better, every year we get more and more creative,” Cardenas said. “We just kind of keep going and it’s something that continues to heal my husband now, even. We’re just kind of in good spirits, obviously, and just I guess trying to spread the love and trying to surround him in all the Christmas narrative and put him in a happy place.”
The attraction is open from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday through Sunday.
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