The Ghastly Lawn Ornament Thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I currently live in new Jersey, ground zero for breath-taking lawn ornaments. And the season of the Hideous Lawn Ornament is hard upon us, with reindeer and Santa and Holy Families cropping up in all their glowing plastic glory. What are your favorite neighborhood atrocities? I divide mine into two categories:

SEASONAL
• Gob-Smacked Santa. This is the four-foot plastic Santa who his smacking his forehead in comic disbelief at the three-foot long wish list he is holding. Never fails to provoke much merriment.

• Christmas in Chernobyl, or the Glowing Holy Family. Huge plastic manger stuffed with the usual suspects, all in painted plastic and lit eerily from within by lightbulbs. There is usually a Frosty or a Santa lurking menacingly in the background, and a few wise men and animals, all of which tend to be lying face-down.

• St. Veronica Lake (aka Surfer Jesus). The colored cardboard Jesus, hung inside one’s window or front door glass. He has blonde marcelled hair, ruby-red lipstick and blush, and is wearing a startling amount of eye makeup. He doesn’t so much look divine as he looks LIKE Divine.

NON-SEASONAL
My neighborhood offers some particularly tasty treats:

• The Fountain of Newark. “When Italian men reach a certain age,” says my friend Joe, “they put a fountain in front of their house. It’s unavoidable. I just know someday I will have woken up to find I’ve done it, too.” My favorite is the huge one in front of a tiny ranch house: big enough for Anita Ekberg to frolic through. Anita Eberg as she looks NOW.

• Suck Finn. A monstrous little boy fishin’ in a fishin’ hole, all made of badly-painted plaster of some sort. To make it more bucolic, the fishin’ hole is empty, so you can see the molded rubber “bed” complete with hosepipe and drain.

• The Comic Alcoholic. I have photographed this one for friends who don’t believe me: a three-foot tall alcoholic, complete with red nose, battered derby and “XXX” bottle, hanging onto a lamppost. I can’t even imagine what these people were thinking . . .

—So, what are some of YOUR neighborhood horrors?

2

In my parents’ neighborhood, there is a house with a birdbath in the front yard. In a circle around the birdbath, beak to tail, are about ten plastic
flamingos.

On walking by the display last week, I wondered aloud why the flamingos weren’t all carrying little American flags.

Ah, well. At least we’re in Florida.

3

I pass one of these on my way home from work. The serene Nativity scene is surrounded by 3 Santas in different poses, Mickey and Minnie dressed as the Clauses, plastic tin soldiers (you know what I mean), Snoopy, a couple of snowmen… There may be more, but I don’t want to stop traffic while I take inventory.

Just across from my kid’s high school is the home of the manic elves. They have every plastic figure, every lighted frame figure, all manner of lights on trees and shrubs and fences and arbor - a true testament to cheesey and tasteless.

My street is a new neighborhood - the last two houses are still under construction. However, the tacky decorations abound. Most horrific are the frenetically flashing “icicles” in white and blue. I’ll hang a wreath on the door, but that’ll likely be it.

4

In the Non-Seasonal category, far and away the Number One choice here in Central Illinois is the plywood cutout of the big-butt female gardener bending over.

In the Christmas Decoration category, out here in the Heartland we are currently up to our armpits in those dangling “under the eaves” icicle lights. The trouble is, people aren’t just hanging them under the main eaves–they’re tacking them onto virtually everything that could qualify, like porch roofs, porch railings, that little roof thingie over a front stoop, you name it.

Here in our working class blue-collar urban residential neighborhood (houses quite close together), we’ve got three neighbors in a row that have their houses completely festooned with multiple sets of these things, and I’m telling you, it looks like Las Vegas on the Prairie down at that end of the street. You look around for Elvis, it’s that bad.

5

I live in NorthEast Ohio, and there’s three lawn ornaments that seem to appear in abundance.

-Porch Geese- (say it fast, and people think you said “portugese”!) A large cement goose, or sometimes a whole gaggle, on one’s porch or in one’s front yard. Often dressed nattily in holiday attire, or whatever is appropriate for the season. Goose fashions are available at nearly craft show in the area. I’ve seen them dressed as Baby New Year, Abe Lincoln, cupid, farmers, rabbi, beachgoers(either swimtrunks or in bikini), spring fashion models, Uncle Sam, eagle, turkey, easter bunny, Pilgrim, ghost, skeleton, witch, snowman, Santa, elves, etc.
(I’ve threatened to run around at night and dress all of the porch geese in our neighborhood in burqa’s, but my wife didn’t think it was as funny as I did!) :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue:

-Madonna in a bathtub- Mary in an alcove that looks as if she’s stinding inside of a half-buried bathtub. Replete with chipped paint and a “splat” where some kid shot her with a paintball gun.

-Pink Flamingo- I have no idea why, but the lawns of Parma Ohio seems to be infamous for having pink flamingo adornments. Some go so far as to hitch a “team” of flamingos to pull their “Santa in sleigh” ornament.

6

My Great Aunt Rose had one of those drunk guy figures in front of her house for years! Of course, she was also married to a guy (Great Uncle Joe) who claimed that the neighbors’ mailboxes were jumping out in front of his car on the way home from the bar…

7

Behold the wonder that is Cheektowaga, New York.

8

We have one of these too. The lady of the house hires the decorating done. Then when the decorators leave (and by then it’s already over done) she goes out and adds more. More light strands of different colors, more plastic figures, more plastic poinsettias, more tiny figures on flat reflective plastic. Since this lady does this for a nmber holidays we are convinced she has too much time and money on her hands.

Oh and she lives across the street from the folks with the huge fountain of a young girl in clingy clothing. The fountain is regularly soaped. One day as we drove by I observed and commented that they had added very prickly bushes around the fountain. My son replied, “Dangit and my name is coming up on that fountain soaping rotation list at school.” I nearly swerved off the road I laughed so hard.

[sub] No he wouldn’t really soap her fountain, but I’ve no doubt that he either knows or has a very good idea of at least some of the kids who’ve done it.[/sub]

9

Here in the Twin Cities, people are partial to wishing wells or rustic assemblages of rickety-looking split-log furniture with brightly-colored gardening implements strewn about, with flowers growing out of the watering cans and humorous sayings on rustic plaques.

Oh, and statues. Big, wood or stone, life-sized statutes of people I should probably know who they are. Or bears. One house actually had something nice done: the elm tree in their front yard succumbed to Dutch Elm diseas, and rather than having it totally removed, they left about 6’ of tree trunk and put a 6’ tall leprechaun statue on top of it.

10

Funniest thing I’ve read in ages! Know what? Divine is buried in a cemetary not five minutes from my house!
Back on track…here in very-Catholic Baltimore, we have tons of the Mary-in-a-bathtub statues. Lots of the drunk guy, too. Lots of the cowboy silhouette, similar to the drunk.
I’ve seen a lot of the half-buried wagon wheel, too, which I never understood.

11

One of our favorite activities is cruisin’ the neighborhood, looking at the decorated, and especially the over-decorated, houses. Pepper Mill and I joke that we couldn’t have bought a house in West Saugus – we couldn’tr afford the electric bill for the Christmas lights. There’s one house in particular that seems to be trying to cover every square inch of his house and lawn with lights, and they’ve almost succeeded. This house draws viewers from all over – his electric meter must be spinning like a top.
Here are our observations for the current year. Pepper is responsible for these – I seem to miss all the good stuff.
Reindeer – Reindeer sculptures, covered with lights, are really popular around us. I’ve never seen so many of them. A lot of them are motorized – moving heads that rotate side to side (“Looking for poachers,” comments MilliCal, our four year old), or up and down. “Rudolphs” with cherry-red noses are thankfully rare, although one house went to the trouble and expense of buying Nine(!) deer, so they could have the full complement for Santa’s sleigh, including Rudolph with a red nose.

Rivers and Pools – People seem to be using sets of blue lights to indicate rivers and streams and (if you spiral them in) pools of water. They often combine this with the motorized bobbing-head reindeer (see above), so that the reindeer seems to be drinking the water.

Light Balls – Volleyball or Softball-sized “cores” to which lights are attached. Never saw them before.

Projected Scenes – I haven’t seen this before this year – people hide a projector somewhere on their lawn and project a scene onto their house wall, or fence. More ambitious ones have a rotating scene.

Moose – like the reindeer, but with Moose antlers. Only saw one of these.

If anyone happens to be in Salt Lake City for the winter (seeing the Olympics, for instance), you have to visit Temple Square. They carefully and painstakingly wire tiny colored lights onto what seems to be every branch and twig of the trees there. The result is truly awe-inspiring. I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere else. One is tempted to say that it requires religious fanaticism, but I don’t want people to take that the wrong way – I’ve got too many LDS friends. Suffice it to say that you need LOTS of volunteer labor for this.

12

" . . . the Number One choice here in Central Illinois is the plywood cutout of the big-butt female gardener bending over."

—Ah, the classic “Fanny Granny” (aka “Panty Auntie”)! We also have a lot of Bathtub Marys, mine being a largely Italian Catholic neighborhood. I once saw a woman tilt her Mary out and Endust her bathtub with a feather-duster.

This is fun—keep 'em coming!

13

My hometown had a guy with a stump in his yard. Well, not a stump. A log. He dresses it up for every holiday. It’s been on the news four times and whenever it’s a slow day the newspaper runs pictures.

There’s also someone whose lawn is fenced in with an eight-foot solid blockout fence, with about six inches of grass between the fence and the gutter, and they’ve packed those six inches with garden gnomes, plastic flowers that wave in the wind, life-size black plywood silhouettes of cowboys, a Fanny Granny, and several insanely large cast plaster squirrels.

My grandmother has a pond in her backyard and she has a “Fishin’ Boy” on it. He used to be The Extremely Stereotypical Horribly Offensive Little Black Fishin’ Boy that she called “my piccaninny” - he had big lips and huge rolling white eyes and his skin was actually BLACK, not brown, BLACK - but then she rented her upstairs apartment to a black man and was moved to he’s been painted carnation pink because Nana couldn’t mix together a good flesh-tone.

My own mother has almost been guilty of lawn-decor atrocities. A couple years ago she decided she wanted to build a pond in the backyard, but at the time we couldn’t afford to buy a real pond-liner. We’d just had the bathtub in my bathroom replaced, so she went outside and buried it in the backyard, filled it with water and plopped a couple of koi into it. She almost bought a pedestal sink to use as a bird bath and a toilet to plant flowers in, but thankfully I talked her out of it.

14

Rather, she rented her upstairs apartment to a black man and was moved to repaint the Stereotypical Fishin’ Boy so as not to offend her tenatn. He’s now been painted…

15

Ah, yes, we have one of these on our street also.

My daughter and I have developed our own code word for these over-decorated monstrosities: Elf-Vomit.

16

There’s a house I pass on my way to work that has a plywood Santa praying to a plywood Baby Jesus in the manger. Very disturbing.

17

For the past few years, my neighbors put up 2 or 3 white wire lawn-reindeer, complete with small white lights for nighttime viewing, in the corner of their front lawn. I vowed that the year that I left the neighborhood I’d rig up a lawn-hunter, with the reindeer in his sights. It couldn’t be that hard - chickenwire and small white lights, with maybe a few hunter’s orange lights as well.

Well, this year is it. The house is on the market; by next spring, I’ll be in Yooperland.

Unfortunately, the neighbors moved in August, and we have new neighbors. So far, no sign of lawn-reindeer. Damn!

18

To understand tacky, you have to have grown up where I did, the lovely town of Manchester, NH (home of the Segway mfg facility!). Our town is divided by a river. The east side is your fairly run of the mill city, standard immigrant representation, nice place to live. The west side, early in the century, became home to a large French-Candian population.

Now, I mean no offense to Canadians, but these people were just strange. They spoke that wonderful Frenglish, where every other word changed language. Or they would speak in English but apply French language constructs (“Throw me down the stairs my shoes”, “Close the light”, “I got the job me”). Tacky was truly their cultural heritage.

Our neighbors came from this backgroud. Year round we had the bathtub Madonna, some frolicking deer, the fountain of light (complete with plastic robins bathing), and at one point the much-hated lawn-jockey.

At Christmas time though, the gloves came off. The nativity was the centerpiece, complete with the lit-from-within holy family, the spotlights on the baby Jesus, some adoring deer (so prevalent in ancient Palestine), and several strategically placed plastic wisemen/shepherds.

On the secular side of the lawn, they had the standard plastic Santa (arranged to be facing towards the little lord Jesus), elves of various sizes, a couple more deer (with sleigh bells to give them the festive look), and some snow people of various shades of dirt.

When people would visit us for the holidays, directions were easy. We would get them to our road then say "Keep driving until you find yourself saying “Oh my God!”, then turn left.

19

Porch geese…snort…hawhawhaw…in clothes…harharharhar…dressin em in burqa’s…ROFLMAO…Grizz I’d come up and help you do that! I want some porch geese now!

My neighborhood is adorned with fake deer, a huge birdbath with a concrete elephant sitting in it, pineapples sitting on top of mailboxes ( it’s a southern thing) and my favorite mailbox decoration…a big ol donkey!

Those damn icicle lights are also all over the place. And now they come in all sorts of colors. Green, red and blue icicles? :rolleyes:

20

More examples of “Christmas in Chernobyl” (God, but I love that line. Thanks, Eve!) here. Why are the Wise men always on their faces? Are they drunk? Over-doing the reverence bit? Did they get gored by the Glowing Nuclear Ox? Or maybe they were just the first to sucumb to radiation sickness.

Many, many “Fanny Grannies”. Also wooden cut-outs of frogs, some doing the “Suck Finn” act (complete with straw hat), others crouching in silent green malice, waiting to ambush and annoy passers-by.