The Lords Hotel is not the sort of place where you'd expect an outpouring of sentimentality.
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It's a traditional country pub in the main street of Scottsdale, brick with licks of crisp white paint on the gables.
But owners Rick and Doona de Nooyer have been working since February, getting up at 6am and spending they-don't-want-to-know-how-much, to turn it into a festive shrine to Christmas.
"We just want to bring some happiness to the community," Mrs de Nooyer said.
The boring function room is now an explosion of lights and baubles; elves and holly; and Santas upon Santas upon Santas.
When it starts to get dark, it takes Mrs de Nooyer about ten minutes to rush around and turn on the various lights, the carols playing in different sections of the room, the snow machine, and the moving mechanical decorations.
Once she is done, the room becomes a living, glowing monument, to the childlike joy she hopes people feel during Christmas.
"I knew that it was going to bring a lot of joy to people," she said.
But she knows this time of year can not be joyful for everyone.
Mrs de Nooyer recently lost her nephew to suicide.
She started putting together the wonderland as a fundraiser for men's mental health charities.
"I lost somebody, I know there's been quite a lot out this way, and there's just so many people, everywhere," she said.
"It really rocked our family. But you've got to move on. And that's part of what this is.
"So, that was the driving force, to try and bring some happiness, because Christmas can be a sad time for a lot of people."
Creating a noisy Christmas spectacle as a fundraising tactic is also one way she hopes to start conversations among the patrons of her no-frills, rural pub.
Mrs de Nooyer is the first one to say some of the blokes that regularly frequent the hotel didn't love the big reveal of what she had been secretly working on all year.
A few of them chafed at the idea of a family-friendly shrine to Christmas frivolities mere metres from where they down their glasses of Boag's.
"But once I explain what it's for, I think they get it," she said.
"Most men have lost a mate or lost somebody, and I think they realise that it's for a really good cause.
"Working in a pub, we see how some people can be quite cruel ... and you just need to be kind. You don't know where someone is at that point, and you could be saying the one thing that tips them over the edge."
Mr and Mrs de Nooyer moved to Scottsdale about seven years ago.
Theirs is one of the surprisingly common stories you hear from residents in small Tasmanian towns: they originally came for a holiday, went back home to the mainland, something got under their skin and before long they found themselves buying a house and moving to the island permanently.
The couple moved from Brisbane, where they owned a Christmas shop and also designed and manufactured specialty, one-off Christmas light structures.
In Brisbane they managed an apartment building which, true to form, they Christmas-ified come December; in that case raising money for the Queensland Children's Hospital.
"It was just incredible, people would walk through the whole complex and it was all decked out, all the tenants got involved," Mrs de Nooyer said.
"Rick and I work very well together. We do these silly things and people don't understand why. I don't really understand either, we just do it.
"I just love to give, and so does Rick. We both come from big families, maybe that's where it comes from. But this is what we love."
After moving to Tasmania they tried something different. The pair took on Swirlz in Brisbane Street, Launceston, where they make many of the sweet treats the shop sells themselves.
Then, about 20 months ago, they also bought the Lords Hotel.
Taking over the pub, Mrs de Nooyer said, has not been the easiest of transitions. Even though they have lived in Scottsdale for over seven years, launching themselves into such an integral part of the community as the pub has been a whole other challenge, and they haven't always felt embraced by the tight-knit small town.
But that just made them all the more determined to do something special.
"This is what I want to do: show people something nice. Make them feel good," she said. "You can't come in here and not feel good."
Between the pub and Swirlz, Mrs de Nooyer has been getting up at 6am for most of the year to fit preparing the wonderland into her 17-hour day.
But she has no regrets. She's seen things like elderly men with tears on their cheeks, and the looks on the faces of Scottsdale's aged care centre residents when they visited as a group.
"That was really, really special," she said. "They were sitting there with snow all over them, they just loved it. That really meant a lot, that I could give them something."
The collection tin at the Lords Hotel Christmas Wonderland is clearly for a gold coin donation.
But after experiencing the sparkling spectacle, people keep putting in twenties and fifties. In the case of one anonymous donor, a cheque for $1000 appeared.
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Mrs de Nooyer has an inkling as to why visitors feel so moved.
She suspects they're feeling the same emotion she feels when she's in the transformed function room: one that is extraordinarily difficult to conjure from the depths of the never-ending anxiety of modern adult life.
"It's the same as what other people say when they come in here: 'I feel like I'm six years old again'," she said.
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