Windcrest Home Security for the City That Lights Up Every December

Windcrest began with a sales problem. Developers Murray and Barbee Winn built the first house in 1954 and needed buyers to notice the rest. Sometime in the mid-to-late 1950s, by her son’s account to KSAT, Barbee Winn had an idea: give homeowners Christmas lights and advertise the display. About five years after that first house, the neighborhood became its own city, and the lights became its signature.

The tradition outgrew its marketing roots long ago. The city now runs an annual Light Up contest with eleven categories, a resident’s turn on a national television light competition raised its profile, and in 2023 the mayor said Yelp had named Windcrest the top spot for Christmas lights. That same year the city added an LED display on its water tower, nicknamed the biggest candle in the State of Texas. Modesty has never been the point of December here.

A city that markets itself with lights understands something useful about security: a lit house reads as an occupied house. The same principle works the other eleven months. Porch, garage, and side-yard lights on a schedule, plus a few interior lamps that come on at dusk, make an empty home look lived in. The Winns used light to bring strangers in. You can use it to keep the wrong ones moving.

A city famous for its lights invites strangers to drive slowly down its streets, which is lovely for nearly everyone. It also means a December evening in Windcrest has more unfamiliar cars and faces than a July one, during the same weeks that packages pile up on porches. Most visitors come for the lights. A few notice the deliveries.

A video doorbell records the porch and lets you speak to whoever is on it, whether you are in the kitchen or out of state. Pair it with a camera aimed at the driveway, since the weekly police blotter keeps listing vehicle burglaries. Our guide to package theft and porch pirates has simple delivery habits that leave nothing to pick up.

Windcrest is a city of settled homeowners. The 2020 Census put the median age at 52.2, and Data USA’s figures show about 87 percent of homes owner-occupied. Many households have been in the same house for a long time, which brings comfortable routines, mature landscaping that hides windows, and older alarm panels nobody has tested in years.

Long tenure is a good reason to modernize the system you already have rather than live with a dead one. A system takeover can often bring working sensors onto current monitoring. A new touchscreen keypad with large, clear buttons makes arming easier for everyone. And because you can trust a quiet street but not a frayed lamp cord, we can add monitored smoke and carbon monoxide detection that calls for help even when nobody is home.

Long tenure also brings family who check in from far away. Adult children in Houston or Denver often want to know that a parent’s house is armed at night and that the smoke detector works. With the owner’s permission, the app can share notifications with more than one phone, so a daughter two states away sees the same alert the central station does.

The police blotter’s recurring entries, burglaries of homes and of vehicles, describe the opportunist rather than the professional. Opportunists read a street the way a shopper reads a shelf: which house is dark, which gate is open, which car has a bag on the seat. Our article on how burglars choose a house walks through the cues they look for.

Most of those cues are cheap to fix. Trim the shrubs below window height. Put porch and side-yard lights on a schedule. Lock the car every night, even in the driveway. Then add the layer that works when you forget: smart locks that relock themselves and a monitored alarm that reports to a central station.

Windcrest sits a short drive from our technicians, who work for a San Antonio company owned locally since 2010 and licensed by the Texas DPS Private Security Bureau as license B16898. On the visit, a technician walks the house with you, tests whatever panel is already on the wall, and points out what a passerby can see from the street, including in December, when far more people are passing by.

You receive a written plan with choices and no hard sell. If you go ahead, we install, train the household, and connect it to 24/7 monitoring from a UL-listed central station. Book a free security assessment to begin.