Employees at Kenmark Inc. of Buckley spend most of the year painting stripes on state, county and local roads and airport runways.

But for the hectic month of November, they play Santa in 70 Michigan towns – arriving after dark and leaving the main street decorated for Christmas by the following morning.

The company has been in the holiday-flare business for about 13 years. That’s when brother-and-sister owners Carman Mexico and Norm Mackey sought out a way to stay busy in the winter.

“One of our reasons was to keep our workers off unemployment for another few weeks,” Carman said.

Most of the towns want their decorations up by Thanksgiving, says Jim Mexico, Carman’s husband, who heads up a two-man shop that designs and builds the steel-framed decorations. So this month, crews have been hustling to hang his creations – four- to five-foot snowmen, snowflakes, candy canes and the like – on light posts all over the state.

The company’s crews work 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shifts, armed with two aerial buckets – one on each side of the road – attaching the decorations onto light poles, while another crew trailers a heap of decorations to the next town on the company’s list.

Kenmark’s net is a wide one. Crews hit communities as far south as Bridgman, as far east as Algonac and as far north as Paradise in the Upper Peninsula. Kind of like the guy in the big red suit? At least in one respect: “When you leave the town, you feel good because the town looks good,” Mexico says.

The work doesn’t end after the holidays; crews race to remove the giant decorations as soon as each community’s living room trees hit the curb. Then for the rest of the year Jim Mexico and colleague Ed Fitch get down to business drawing new designs and drumming up business for the next season.

Kenmark usually rotates designs in a given town from year to year, though some customers make specific requests. Their most popular designs: the poinsettia and the zigzag Christmas tree.

Carman says she would have expected the recession to create a dent in the business, but even struggling towns seem unwilling to go without a little festive zing.

In Six Lakes, for example, the township took over funding when the local chamber of commerce – which usually foots the bill – couldn’t afford it this year.

Faced with a similar shortage, Mt. Morris turned to their version of Mrs. Claus: the mayor’s wife, who took it upon herself to spearhead a fund drive.