Christmas lights

Christmas morning was quiet, cold and beautiful this year with a fresh covering of snow. I went out around 7:30am to take this picture of our humble abode with our Christmas lights and the tree if you can see through the front window. Some may say that our strand of lights is a bit meager, but I prefer the restrained approach on our home just so long as we can walk through the neighborhood to see some over the top examples of luminary debauchery on other people’s homes.


For instance, down the road a couple of miles we have the local favorite Christmas Street where everyone on the block decorates their homes with Christmas lights in a seeming ever increasing competition for who has the most lights. Also apparent this year is the Christmas blow up ornament, grotesque pneumatic surrogates for Christmas decoration that fail completely in imparting any intimacy or sense of the sacred. Call me old fashioned, but I like the hand-made snowman (or snowwoman as the case may be) and prefer my holiday inflatable peans to commercialism to be flying over 34th Street in Manhattan on Thanksgiving Day.


Seeing all those houses on Christmas Street makes you wonder what those community meetings must be like and what happens to those households that refuse to be part of it. Do you sign a contract saying you will decorate your home with all sorts of Christmas luminance when you move in or is it more of a social pressure thing to perform? And what is going on in the house below? The red light streaming out of the front window with two ghostly looking dolls peering through just creeped me out.


However, for a truly over the top example of Christmas lights on someone’s residence, we took a little journey about two miles North of us with a house that requires the wide angle lens along with a healthy suspension of disbelief to encompass the spectacle.


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