Oh, man. My coworkers and I drive every day by a house near Calais that’s got a yard full of garden sculptures, with a sign that says “free entrance”. Every day we say “some day we have to stop”; we probably never will.
It looks a lot like that.
Spain and Italy are among the locations which celebrate and give gifts on January 6th. We’re not taking our Christmas decorations down before that date and reserve the right to do it on the 7th if it does not happen to be a working day Then again, most of us live in flats…
There’s a guy in my neighborhood who starts putting up his lights around Halloween and puts up about as much stuff as the person GuanoLad mentioned, and all festooned with lights, including the trees on his property and artificial trees, and leaves it up well into February, and even still has lights on a tree by the garage ALL YEAR LONG (at least they are just ordinary, non-blinking white lights). Not that I am really complaining but it just strikes me as wasteful extravagance (mostly non-LED*, so he probably gets a quite hefty electric bill).
*LED Christmas lights might be worthy of their own Pit thread, namely how they always rust (small LEDs usually use plated steel leads which are fine indoors but not outside in totally unsealed sockets) and fail, often after a few weeks if it has been wet (so much for being more reliable), so you end up spending more on LED lights+electricity than incandescent lights+electricity (not that I put up outdoor lights, just from what I see and how often they are thrown out in the condition described, better brands might have sealed sockets).
This summer the house across the street from us sold. We have our Thanksgiving in October here in the great white north and they took the after Thanksgiving cue for decorating. For 3 weeks it was an unholy conglomeration of orange/black/red/green and white. After Halloween the orange and black disappeared but it’s still an ungodly number of lights that they leave on 24/7 and that BLINK. Fortunately I have blackout curtains on the windows that face the street or there would be hell to pay.
The house a few down from them followed their cue and installed 3 of those inflatable christmas things that are taller than the houses on this street. They’ve been laying flat on the ground for so long now that I wonder if someone took a knife to them.
I went to a Christmas lunch/dinner/whatever at an uncle’s once and he had a bunch of wicker reindeer on the lawn. We were all inside for quite a while and when we finally headed outside so he could see us off we saw that the deer had been rearranged to look like they were fucking.
I thought it was hilarious but my uncle didn’t see the humor in it.
Hey, don’t blame him for the fact that you have an antiquated transmission that requires you to make time-consuming gear-shifts instead of a smooth-running automatic…
Well, if I was King of the World, Christmas would be standardised. As would Easter, always on the 1st Sunday of April, no more of this pagan “phase of the moon” nonsense.
The sticky ends of tape tend to, you know, stick. It’s entirely possible that the wind took down your display. You already implied you weren’t sure they’d hold up. If they weren’t entirely secure, and they were all connected, there’s a decent chance that wind knocked one or two over and the rest came with them.
I’m not going to call you out specifically on decorating early or overdecorating, but I never understood the desire to cover the yard with shiny blinking Christmas shit. There are a few houses in my area with life-sized nativity sets, gaudy and floodlit, dominating their front yards. There are more animatronic LED deer than ever this year, and more of those God-awful inflatables. There are even moving inflatables now. I understand a tree or two. I understand candles and wreaths in the the windows. Lights along the porch and eaves - pretty. But why must they fill the yard with so much crap?
That happened to me on the 1st. We were both at red lights (at intersecting streets). My light turned green, but she decided to go a split second after I did. Three weeks later, my car’s still in the shop (airbags deployed). Her? She got red paint on her front bumper.
Then again, most of us live in flats…