So. The very first thread I ever read here was this one, back when I was in school. Yeah, look and laugh at how long it took me to get up the nerve to register and post.
My college friends thought I was hilarious when I started refering to “Christmas in Chernobyl” (the glowing holy family), which I owe Eve for, because I’m never funny on my own.
Anyway, I think about that thread every time I see horrible Christmas decorations. What lurks near your house, and would it in fact make Baby Jesus cry?
Near me: Well, there are quite a few. The worst has a their lawn adorned with a dozen GIANT inflatable figures, all with spotlights on them. Nativity, elves, creepy children, frosty, etc. On the corner facing the street is a huge throne (seriously) festooned with lights, garlands, and ribbons. Giant Inflate-A-Santa sits on his throne, beconing demonically at drivers passing by.
Across the street there was a lovely tableau with lighted wicker reindeer. Two weeks ago a giant blow-up snowman appeared behind the reindeer. Now it looks like winter poo.
They get to look at my beautifully appointed cactus, with multi-colored lights on its many arms. A joy to behold (hey, the neighbors have been stopping and telling me so). And I have to look at Christmas gack.
::Get the knife quick! I’ll put that damned snowman out of its misery. It’ll look just like a giant snowdrift. In Arizona. Yeah, that’s the ticket…::
Not exactly in my neighborhood, but along my route home. This guy has one of those halloween scooby dos in his yard. But he’s added a big red velvet bow to one ear.
Along the way home, there are these awful inflatable Christmas figures. Those ones that are like one story high. All in a row. I want to go attack them with a dart gun.
A couple houses into my neighborhood, there is a house that goes all out with Christmas lights. Most of the stuff they do wouldn’t look all that bad by itself, but with it all on the same house it is way overdone. It’s to the point where we might as well just turn off all of the streetlights in the neighborhood as this one house can light everything up.
Around this time of year, our neighborhood always puts a pineapple and two apples on the nice sign at the entrance to our neighborhood. They’re real, but we’ve never had a problem before. This year, however, we can drive by and one day they’ll have just been put out and therefore are whole. The next day, there will be bites gone (probably from raccoons- which, for some reason, ignore the pineapple and only eat the apples). The third day, the entire apple will be gone. Day four roles around, and someone decides to try again by putting up more apples. Repeat process.
Reporting in from Northern NJ, ground zero for tacky lawn decorations.
The Graf Zeppelins monica mentions: 8-foot-tall inflatable Frosties, Santas, Homer Simpson and Scooby-Doo as Santa, reindeer . . . The local paper, I am happy to say, is rife with police reports of these horrors being shivved, which gives me some hope for my neighbors’ taste.
“Classic” Holy Families: brightly-colored plastic nativities, either in “realistic” or in “Fifties cartoon” style.
Those weird goddam skeletal reindeer.
Radio City-style nutcracker/tin soldier-type thingies lining the walkway.
Carolers. I almost like these, because they are invariably the height of Fifties kitsch: plastic children with more makeup on than Dame Edna.
Lights. Millions and millions of lights. One for every broken heart on Broadway. You can see my neighborhood from the moon.
We have a 10’ inflatable Frosty on the side of our front lawn, which I like, despite generally sharing the disdain for the inflatable-giant-congregation-of-garish-characters-on-the-lawn look. Call me a hypocrite.
My son and I especially like the shapes and poses Frosty assumes when the wind gets especially strong. Depending upon which way the breeze is blowing, our commentary is some variation of the following:[ul][li]They must be way ahead in the final minute of the fourth quarter. Frosty’s taking a knee.[/li][li]Hey, everybody! Let’s all follow Frosty in the limbo line![/li][li]I’m melting! What a world, what a world![/li][li]Frosty’s ralphing. (This is one of my son’s stand-by lines.)[/li][li]Frosty must have had one too many egg nogs, the fat sot.[/li]Allah be praised! Look at Frosty kneeling toward Mecca.[/ul]We are aslo amused driving through the neighborhood during the day, when everyone’s inflatable guys have been turned off while people are at work. They all lie there in wrinkled heaps, as if the victims of sniper fire from some giant-jolly-character-hating sociopath.
I was born and raised in north Jersey, and I can never quite explain to my friends out the horrors they are missing. Around here we’ve got one or two tacky houses everyone laughs at.
Back home, there are whole streets. Decoration spotting is a sport.
(Btw, Eve, if you happen live in northern Bergen County anywhere near a house with a sloped lawn with so many white, light-up figures on the lawn that it looks like a Deer-Herding-Snowmen’s Anonymous convention, with waving Santa keeping watch by the drive way. . . That would be my parents. God forgive me.)
On Route 202/Littleton Road in Morris Plains there is a house with two old tree beheaded tree trunks approximately oh…20 feet apart. About 8 - 10 foot tall. They install a ladder-looking thing on top between the two trunks - heck it might even be an actual ladder. On this, they put Santa & his sleigh - landing on the ladder. On top of a Nativity scene built underneath the ladder.
Cracks me up every damn time I pass it, which is every day on my way to the office.
