I just don’t get the appeal of the nutcracker soldier/doll or whatever it is. They’re frightening looking - they should be a Halloween decoration. And they’re ugly! They have weird, fuzzy hair sticking out and usually a bad mustache and/or beard. How did that get to be a Christmas decoration? Was it just from the ballet The Nutcracker? I went to see The Nutcracker years ago (I didn’t know much about it beforehand) and thought to myself as I watched, “Why would the little girl, Clara be so excited to get THAT as a gift?!”
Is there anything that’s a crummier Christmas decoration than a nutcracker?
Our worst decoration is a plastic rocket that upon the push of a button emits a long series of different electronic rocket-like noises, all of them obnoxiously grating. It was given to my son when he was about 5. Finally, after 20 years, the battery has died.
Those gigantic blow-up santas/snowmen. They seem to exist solely for people who both want to be outrageously garish and tacky, and want to spend the least possible amount of time and effort doing it.
The house near my kids’ school had a yard full of these. During the drive to school in the morning we’d pass the house, and they were always deflated, spread out on their lawn like a crime scene.
Decades ago, when I rented an apartment in a house, down the street, this family would leave their orange jack-o-lantern trash bags full of leaves out in their yard through Christmas and will into February. So yes, orange jack-o-lantern trash bags are crummier Christmas decorations than nutcrackers.
We have a neighbor who decorates his yard with Christmas gnomes every year. They look like regular gnomes with white beards, but they all wear Santa hats. There are gnomes carrying Santa-like bags over their shoulders, gnomes decorating Christmas trees, gnomes hanging stockings on a mantle, gnomes carrying giant candy canes, gnomes on sleds being pulled by reindeer, one gnome handing another gnome a large Christmas gift, gnomes scaling small chimneys with bags of presents, gnomes building snowmen, you name it! The whole scene is nauseating & I’d take nutcrackers any day over gnomes.
One near me is more unusual then bad. He has a vertical pipe that goes up about 30 feet. He then trickles water out of it all the time in freezing weather. This produces a huge freaking Xmas tree shaped mount of ice. On a good year it must weigh 10,000 lbs. At times he has lights on it.
My neighbor has a blowup Santa-and-Rudolph-in-a-helicopter on their roof, and a giant ATAT on their lawn. Lovely - even if it WEREN’T for the unceasing hum of the blowers…
When I lived in Clearwater, FL, area 15-ish years ago, there was a guy who had a big piece of land with a circular driveway. In the middle of this driveway area, he had rigged up some kind of machine–it was snowman shaped–that condensed the moisture in the air around it and made a snowman in the middle of 80[sup]o[/sup] December Florida! He had a sign on the main drag pointing into his property that read “Cold Frosty.” You just had to drive in for a look-see.
If you don’t want one outside, they have the inside versions:
In traditional Spanish nativity scenes they have a pooping figure, the caganer. I think there’s one of these in the nativity at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City:
There’s a company that makes modern caganers, and custom ones. You can get Donald TRump:
Or celebrities:
Or ET
The ultimate self-referential thing would be a Christmas Mr. Hankey caganer, but that doesn’t seem to exist. Yet.
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