Oh yes, the Bathtub Mary. We don’t get a lot of real bathtubs, though. (I have seen plenty around here.) Usually it’s a concrete grotto. And Mary gets a fresh coat of paint every Spring.
Sometimes the refurbishing goes awry. There are more than a few Mary’s around with patched necks.
The creepiest Mary is just a head. It’s Mary’s head in a birdhouse looking thing hanging on a house abouve their front garden. Poor bodyless Mary.
-Rue.
My neighbor has a Lawn Jockey, but he took the lantern out of the jockey’s hand and replaced it with a flag.
Oh, and the Garden Gnomes. Creepy little things that probably go in the house at night and hide under the bed, only to drag Kim Darby off while poking her with sticks and whispering “Sally!”
My pet hate is those “novelty” garden gnomes. You know, the ones with an axe in the forehead, knife in their chest etc etc. Just gives me ideas about what to do with the dork who put them in the garden.
A little lead in: across the street from me is a huge tudor. Folks call it “the mansion”. Attached greenhouse and (so I hear) bowling alley in the basement. Nuff said?
It sold a couple of years ago. The story I heard was the new buyer was in the carpeting business. He sold a ton of carpeting to some resort in the far east, which reneged on the payment. So, instead of $, he got numeous large statues. Most wonderful are the 6’ tall winged fu dogs standing guard on either side of the front door, and the gigantic (at least 8’) grimacing warrior guarding his driveway.
There is one person in my parents’ neighborhood that has an abundance of garden gnomes, plastic flowers, (?) and at the head of her driveway are two 4 foot tall ceramic Siamese cats. She also has multi-colored rockbeds in her garden. (It looks like aquarium rocks.) I think I may go “liberate” the regular gnomes and replace them with a few of those novelty gnomes. 
<obscure “Suburbia” reference> In the limo, man! </osr>
There are some people that rival “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” here. The only one that I’ve seen so far has the Christmas in Chernobyl in 3 different spots on their lawn. Of course, there are also 4 Santas, whole herds of reindeer, Frostys, large plywood snowflakes, the light icicle-under-the-eaves, and flashing multi-colored lights all over every inch of yard. It’s an amazing sight, along the lines of a train wreck, that is.
I just wet my pants. 
Mr. Bobkitty and I are guilty of this, but only for Christmas and Halloween.
We have the lights, and the cutsey road-sign type signs that you put in the ground, but what will no doubt be sending us to hell are the Frosty and Pooh Glow-Men[sup]tm[/sup].
Forget about Chernobyl. Forget about Three-Mile Island. We’ve got 'em beat.
See, you can only put a relatively low-wattage bulb in the plastic statues, 'cause of the heat factor. But Mr. Bobkitty, ever the resourceful one, reasoned that if it was a problem with heat, then a high-wattage, low-heat bulb would work. So he put in florescent bulbs.
You can read by the light that comes out of Frosty and Winnie. From about a block away.
Y’know, I’m inspired to create a “Christmas in Chernobyl” web site! But we need pictures! I’ll do what I can to capture some of the mid-Hudson Valley/Berkshires Christmas atrocities on film in a couple of weeks when I’m back home; I’d appreciate any help y’all could give me to. Eve, may I use your catchphrase for this phenomenon? Maybe after the holidays I could branch out into just plain hideous lawn ornaments in general…
But I like this one:
A neighbor of mine owns an ancient, two cylinder John Deere tractor, vintage the 1940s. It’s the one us ol’ timers call the Poppin’ Johnny. This tractor worked the fields until about 10 years ago, when he decided to retire it. Instead of letting it rust out behind the barn, he restored it and now puts it in the farm shows, winning a fair amount of trophies. And at Christmas…
He drives the old crock into his front yard and lights it up. During the daytime, it looks like hell with all of the wires, support poles, and other crap hanging off of it, but at night, it’s worth driving a distance to see.
It’s not easy to describe, but I’ll try: The whole thing is outlined and filled in with green lights, with the wheels having several circles of white. The seat is also white as is the exhaust. There is a big cloud of blue smoke coming from the exhaust (lots of poles and wires). In around the engine are small, blinking lights of various colors. Sorry, but that’s the best I can do.
He’s threatened to put a sleigh and santa behind it, but we’ve convinced him that it would be going too far.
It’s a wonderful display.
f
One of the displays we saw had all steady lights (of all colors) except for one – the one representing the Baby Jesus. That yellow light blinked on and off. So Jesus is easy to find – he’s the one that blinks! (This is how the Magi found him.)
I used to think my next door neighbor had a “Fanny Granny” in her yard. Then I realized it was my next door neighbor herself! :eek:
CalMeacham I moved to Melrose last year and that neighborhood off Rte 1 in Saugus is one of the scariest things I have ever seen. My mother has even told me that when she was younger they used to take family trips to view the Xmas lights…she’s 50.
This has been quite a year for that neigborhood as they’ve been able to patriotically decorate. My favorite right now is the house that has a 10-15’ Statue of Liberty in the front yard. All of the lawn jockeys, gnomes, bunnies, geese, wishing wells, wagons, shiney balls and peeing statues have flags adorning them somewhere.Further on down the road is a very boring house that makes up for it’s lack of elan with its mailbox- a life sized plastic dolphin holding the mailbox in its fins. It hurts me.
I live in a triple decker house with 1 apartment per floor. The people on the bottom floor have lived there for close to 30 years and leave their Xmas decorations up for about 9 months out of every year. The bus I take to and from the train everyday stops right in front of the house…so everynight I get to watch all the bus riders point and laugh as we pull up in front of the monstrosity that is my house because of the:
[ul]
[li] Icicle lights everywhere[/li][li] 3’ tall plastic light posts on either side of the stairway that light up[/li][li] reindeer and sleigh shaped plastic light up things hanging from the porch[/li][li] The stop sign that says “Santa! Stop here!” (their youngest child is 28)[/li][li] Candy canes, ribbons and wreaths everywhere[/li][li] The tree out front decorated like an Xmas tree[/li][li] but my all time favorites are the 4’ tall plastic light up Santa and Frosty that sit on the porch roof…right outside the windows to my living room. We no longer need to turn on the living room lights at night.[/li][/ul]
Why A Duck We also use the lights as a way of directing people to our house…it’s almost worth it to see the looks of confused disgust upon their faces as they enter our home.
We refer to it as “vomiting Christmas” - but I like CC better.
Our neighbors go WAY overboard for Halloween & Christmas both - they have two fairly large (15’ x15’) sheds in their backyard FILLED with decorations.
The somewhat unique item - a runway for Santa’s sleigh…
There’s another house in town with a very small yard - maybe 8’ X 25’ (runs alongside the house) that they FILL with tacky holiday stuff…
If I get a chance, I’ll take pix & post the URL…
Have you seen those “Witch on broomstick which has crashed into a house/tree and is now flattened” dolls around Halloween? Well, in response to their popularity, my neighbor has made a “Santa, crashed and flattened on the house wall” complete with broken sled, scattered presents, reindeer butts/antlers sticking out of the bushes at odd angles.
Photos soon to follow…
One of the houses that we LOVED in West Saugus was all decked out in PINK lights, and had Santa in his sligh flying over the Nativity. That house was worth visiting. Unfortunately, this year there’s nothing up at all. Either a.) they’re late; b.) they sold the house; or c.) they had a sudden attack of Good Taste. Any of these would be a pity.
Mogwei – good to hear we’re practically neighbors (We used to live in Melrose, before we moved to Saugus). If you haven’t yet done it, go to the triangle of streets bounded by Main Street in Saugus, the Fells Parkway, and Route 1 (All of this just to the west of Rte. 1). It’s the greatest concentration of incredible lighting we’ve seen.
There are at least a half-dozen of those damn things still up in my town. Would someone please get a giant spatula and scrape the Smashed Witch off the house already?
elmwood, that link was hilarious! I especially loved this picture. What are these people thinking???
And no thread on this topic would be complete without a link to one of my all time favorite SD threads: Nonie & Oscar’s Tacky Nativity Scene.
I really appreciate your consideration in avoiding stepping on my penis - Spiny Norman
[sym][sub][sup]©[/sup][/sub][/sym] Jeg elsker dig, Thomas [sym][sub][sup]©[/sup][/sub][/sym]
The Southern California town I grew up in had (and probably still has) the oldest median age of inhabitants in America. People come from far and wide to retire there. Retirement apparently means never mowing a yard again, so they install gravel or rock yards, usually plastic-coated, often colored green for that lawn-like ambiance, and decorate them with all of the items mentioned here by others, and then some.
Three popular ones that haven’t been discussed previously:
Two Toads on a Loveseat. They may be frogs; they have happy cartoony faces so it’s hard to pin down their taxonomic identification. The loveseat is actually that Victorian conversation seat that has an S-curve back so that the two seated people (or toads) face one another.
The Bacchanalian Nymph. This maiden resembles the Sunkist Raisin girl, but her garments are draped and Grecian. Her basket of grapes is held above her head.
Siesta. A poncho-clad figure snoozing beneath a cactus, almost hidden beneath his immense sombrero. Often seen with a nearby burro.
My current neighborhood has an area called Christmas Card Lane, actually made up of several streets, in which the majority of the houses display giant plywood Christmas cards. These often have a Disney theme and some of them have nothing whatever to do with Christmas - one of the nicest ones celebrates the joy of reading - I can only guess that there is some serious pressure to comply. They’ve written about the origins of this in the newspaper but it didn’t stick with me. But it’s a big attraction and a big traffic problem during the holidays.
If you pin me down, I’ll admit I’m quite fond of these kitschy things and plan to have at least some cement rabbits in my retirement home’s yard…but not gravel sprayed green, thank you very much.
Wow, this totally jogged my memory of this house along I65 in Northern Indiana. I forget the exact location, but I’m thinking somewhere between Kokomo and Indianpolis there’s a ranch house surrounded by those giant concrete animals like you used to see in front of fast food chicken type places. I remember they had a giant unicorn on it’s hind legs, I think a cow and my personal favorite, a life sized hippo…complete with a huge fountain for it to “drink” out of. I forget what the whole menagerie was comprised of, and over the years they’d taken to moving some to the back yard so as not to be so shocking, but I remember as a kid driving by that house was the most amazing thing in the world.
I personally have a pair of flamingos, but mainly because we live in a complex of about a million identical townhouses; so I can say “It’s the one with flamingos.”
(I’ve never heard of/seen the drunk on the lamppost…WHERE CAN I GET ONE!!!)
Aw nuts, after consulting a map, I realise I meant Highway 31 in Indiana, not I65. (Hope no one has rushed off in their cars already, heh heh.)
My favorite hideous Xmas lawn decoration is the Blinkin’ Baby Jesus in the Manger. Plastic lit-from-within piece of crap, but with a light that blinks. Ugh.
Well, not “piece-of-crap,” I guess. That would be the Blinkin’ Mister Hanky Xmas lawn ornament.
