Holiday Runners-Up

This past weekend hubby and I were fortunate enough to have a few evening hours to call our own, and with the promise of a triple venti mocha, I was able to tempt him out of the house for a walk through the neighborhood. Armed with my trusty digital cam, I snapped off some shots (ok, 80) of the most hideous holiday decorating offenders between shrieks of "Is that an animated snowman?" and "I bet you can see this from space!" I found these gems the most appauling of the bunch:


Clearly our neighborhood has been re-zoned as "Inflatable". Let's take a quick tally shall we? Inflatable Santa. Inflatable tree. Inflatable Snowman. Inflatable snowglobe with churning snow. Inflatable chimney with inflatable Rudolf. Inflatable Igloo. Inflatable penguin. I'm pretty sure that there are small civilizations that don't require this much energy to power their entire town. But oh the glory of the holidays -- certainly it's worth it.


Not to be overshadowed by their inflatable neighbor, these folks did their part to deplete the energy supply by lighting up every last object in their yard. I particularly enjoy the candy canes and mini Christmas trees lined up haphazardly around their, now-hidden, front porch. Is it impossible to get these things in straight? I swear I haven't seen anything close to a 90 degree cane since I started this exercise. One last thing, since when is Santa dwarfed by a penguin? Blasphemous.


I'll admit that this isn't the best photo I've taken. But the beauty is not in the detail of the photo. In fact, the beauty is in the fact that every detail seems to have been utterly ignored. Patriotic tree, "whimsically" draped rope lights, disproportionately small illuminated sled, randomly placed deer, mismatched colored lights. It's as though they bought a box of used Christmas lights at a garage sale and put them up with their eyes closed. There! Done! Now don't look directly at it, son.


I hope you are enjoying my ongoing holiday diatribe because I spotted two more parts of town for the next installment of my rant. Think palm trees and lights, lots and lots of lights. Oh, and I might even try to get a picture of a not-ugly house. I think it is possible to do these things tastefully and I'm determined to find an example that doesn't exist in the pages of Potterybarn or other such unrealistic representations.

Until then...