Pandora LaCasse in her Portland studio, where she creates and maintains the winter light forms seen throughout Portland and other towns. This season marks 25 years that LaCasse has been installing the lights in public places. Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald

Pandora LaCasse had never worked in color.

In 1999, Portland Downtown hired the artist for a holiday installation in Tommy’s Park. LaCasse was working with metal and wire and Plexiglas. Her palette was decidedly neutral, and her pieces didn’t require a power source.

“I was doing sculptural installations at that point, so I just needed to add the lights,” LaCasse, now 72, said. “You know, how hard is that? Pretty hard, turns out. It’s been fun ever since, actually.”

Today, Portland glows green and purple and red and hot pink from November to March. For 25 years, LaCasse has brightened the darkest days of the year with her seasonal displays. As the number of sites has increased to 15 and counting, so has the amount of time needed to install them every year. Preparations begin in late summer, well before the first notes of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” sounds over retail speakers.

Trees are decorated with lights at Congress Square Park. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald

For the first time, the artist has delegated the task of wrapping trees and hanging glowing orbs to an outside crew instead of family and friends. She wants to spend less time in the bucket truck and more time designing new work for even more locations. And her fans similarly want to ensure the light never fades.

“Our goal over the last couple years is to future-proof it,” said Betsy Boyd, community outreach and engagement manager at Portland Downtown, which pays for a majority of LaCasse’s installations in the city. “The community has such a massive outpouring for the program. We will hear all season long from people who grew up looking at the lights or come to town specifically to see the lights. That’s a huge part of our identity.”

AN ARTIST’S VISION

Tommy’s Park was the first, and it is still LaCasse’s favorite.

“What drew me to the park were the trees because they were so tall,” she said. “They were tall in the sense that they really took up vertical space, not just at your level.”

She wanted to illuminate the height of the trees among the buildings, the stretch of their limbs in the cityscape. LaCasse wrapped their long trunks and then spiraled the strands of lights around select branches.

It is also a favorite site for Alex Quataert, owner of Blingle of Portland, the outdoor lighting company that is installing LaCasse’s work this year. She is helping to direct the crew so they can execute her vision, and Quataert said he is learning from her attention to detail and her perspective as an artist.

Richmond Wiegman, lead light installer for Blingle, operates a boom lift to install Pandora LaCasse’s creations in a tree in Lincoln Park. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

“Choosing the limbs was something that, frankly, as a lighting designer, I never thought of that much,” he said, “but with Pandora, she really taught me how to get the sense of the tree by choosing the right limbs to wrap and to make it really stand out at night in the right way. You really get the sense of what the tree is without necessarily doing every single limb.”

LaCasse and her husband, David, are both from Skowhegan and attended the University of Maine at Orono. She majored in art and minored in botany, while he studied engineering. She received a master of fine arts in sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania, and her family later returned to her home state.

She has a long history of teaching, including at the Maine College of Art & Design. The basement at the school, in fact, is where she stores the 400-or-so forms during the other three seasons of the year. In late summer, LaCasse and her team go down there to assess the need for repairs. They do exactly what you might do at home – plug ’em in to see how many bulbs are dead.

LaCasse hires helpers for the season to check and replace individual strands, and she likes to refresh a site with entirely new lights every three years or so to maintain an even brightness. She sometimes redesigns a site, moves forms from one location to another or changes the color scheme. Actual installation began this year in October, and the whole setup takes more than a month.

LaCasse shares her East Bayside studio building with her husband and son, who have an engineering business. Her sunlit workspace is full of treasures and tools. There’s a key to the original electrical box at Tommy’s Park, right next to a framed key to the city for her years on the public art committee. There’s a rattlesnake skin from an installation she did in Texas and a model of a commission she is making for Portland Stage. Boxes are neatly labeled “FUSES” or “SAFETY GOGGLES.”

This is where she builds the forms of her sculptures from metal and wire. The winter lights in Portland are her biggest job, but she has done work for private clients and other cities. From the ceiling hung three light forms from a park in Boston that needed repair this year, and she took one down for a closer look.

LaCasse unhooks one of her many lighting sculptures from the ceiling where they are stored in the basement of Maine College of Art in downtown Portland to be moved to Lincoln Park. For 25 years, LaCasse has been making Portland glow in the winter. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

“Let’s see what’s wrong with this one,” she said. Only half of the lights turned on when she plugged in the extension cord. “Ah.”

She methodically clipped the dead strings of lights from one form to be replaced.

“Most of my forms are very organic, bringing back the organic that gets lost in the shuffle of the seasons,” she said.

LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

The winter lights are organized and funded by private sources. The city covers the cost of electricity and helps with planning on occasion but does not actually pay for the lights themselves. Parks director Alex Marshall said the department decorates the big tree in Monument Square and wraps some trees in lights to provide a backdrop of sorts for LaCasse’s art.

“In parks, we are all about beautification and creating memories for folks, residents and visitors coming into Portland,” Marshall said. “That’s one of the primary elements of our mission. The winter months, there are no flowers, there are no leaves. It’s very barren and gray, and a way for us to beautify and bring some color to the city for everyone here to enjoy in the winter is to help support the lighting displays that go up.”

Trees at Longfellow Square in Portland are reflected in a passing bus on Congress Street. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald

Some sites, such as the glowing orbs on the front of MECA&D and the iconic display in the “candelabra” tree in Deering Oaks, are privately funded. Anne Pringle, president of the Friends of Deering Oaks Park, declined to say how much the annual installation costs the nonprofit. But she said the project is a beloved and important one for donors, members and nearby residents.

“What we wanted to do was bring life to the park during the bleak winter months,” Pringle said.

For years, LaCasse installed her glowing forms in the trees around the skating pond in Deering Oaks. But the ground underneath those trees no longer freezes by December, which causes her lift to get stuck and create ruts. She didn’t hang all the forms there last year as a result. This year, she worked with the city and the Friends of Deering Oaks Park to find new locations for her work in big trees along one of the roads that pass through the park.

Portland Downtown will pay nearly $110,000 for installations at eight locations this year. The nonprofit raised $20,000 this year for its winter programs, including the lights, but the rest of the money comes from its annual budget of $1.2 million.

“Everybody is coming together to keep having it every year,” Boyd said. “The breadth of it having grown so much really does make it such an impressive thing.”

Ashley Macomber is the assistant manager at Rough & Tumble, which sells bags and accessories. The Middle Street store is directly across from Tommy’s Park, and the twinkle of the trees is visible through the windows. Macomber grew up in Portland and associates the glow with this season in the city.

“It’s always something to look forward to,” she said. “When the lights go up, it’s like, ‘Oooh.’ ”

On a quiet weeknight in the Old Port, Kasia Mikolajewska, of Raymond, posed for a photo with a visiting friend on the corner of Middle and Exchange streets. The lights of Tommy’s Park shone in the background. She likes the varied colors of the lights (“I’m a purple girl,” she said) and the fact that they aren’t explicitly tied to the holidays.

“They’re different,” she said. “It’s not typical white and red and green.”

People walk through Longfellow Square on November 25. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald

A BELOVED TRADITION

The tradition is not just for Portland. It is part of LaCasse’s family as well.

For years, they banded together to hang lights around town. Her son, Christopher, worked out the measurements for some of the most complicated forms. Her daughter, Bree, helped figure out how to spiral springs of lights around them. Her nephew once showed off to his date by briefly turning on the lights in Longfellow Square for her, and then a passerby called the police to report him for tampering with the display. Her grandkids are now helping as well. Like many families, they make an annual tour of the glowing displays of what longtime Portlanders in the know sometimes just call “Pandora’s lights.”

“We usually go around and look at all the lights and critique,” LaCasse said with a laugh.

In her own Portland home, LaCasse likes to set up a twinkling tree for the holidays. But does she deck the outside with her art as well? No, just the rest of the city.

“I get my tree up,” she said. “And that’s about it.”