on the twelfth day of What the Effmas...

...everything but candy canes.

at the 11th hour a snow wife throws herself to her death,
a 10 foot high train track makes an iffy descent,
9 candy canes contributed to a eyeball searing Christmas-themed rave,
8 cars were inconvenienced in the taking of this photo because OBVIOUSLY,
7 choices were set out for the dog's festive dumping,
a 6 foot polar bear kidnapped an unidentifiable inflatable creature,
5 snowmen taunted me from around this off-season May pole,
a 4 foot high elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses,
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
and there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

OK, so maybe you were hoping for something with the #12 in it. You know, to make the whole What the Effmas experience complete.

Well, if that's the case, I'm sure there are at least a dozen of those big glowing tree ornaments, or maybe those little fiber optic pseudo-trees or strings of lights wrapped around the door pillars, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go with this numerical succession thing because, at the end of the day, this is the house that haunts me most from all of the photos I've taken.

Come closer and just FEEL the haunting. Also, blurring. Sorry, the dog was pulling me.

Maybe that's because I see this house daily and fantasize about going hog wild ripping lights down from its eaves. Maybe it's because the pattern blinked out by the flashing snowflakes in the trees, net lights draped across the lawn and bulbs nailed to the roof top give the dog the shits. Or maybe it's because EVERY YEAR these psychos put up more lights and more craziness in order to compete with these other maniacs to win the neighborhood's apparently coveted Best Lights Display award based on votes from my more annoying neighbors.

Bubba and I tried, one year, to derail the voting process and discourage resource-melting displays and their corresponding neighborly competitiveness by actually taking part in the voting process and placing our votes for the house with the fewest lights (we were going to vote for a house without any decorations, but thought that our votes would be discarded), but that whole campaign didn't take hold and our votes were left in the "Who are these people?" pile when they were sorted into winners versus losers.

Yet again, the Decorated House That Inspires The Ass Sprays won again, and we were left to shield our eyes from behind the shuttered windows of our home, applying sunscreen to take the dog on her nightly walks.

But because I can't bear to disappoint you fine folks, who join me here in the later months with hearty encouragement for my holiday decoration hating rants, I gift to thee, the rest of the photos deemed eye-scorchingly criminal by my strict standards:

Blue rope lights should be outlawed altogether.

If only they had the inflatable Santa driving a motorcycle with the penguin in the sidecar, this would be perfectly awful.

Jada barked at that dog and then peed on it. Good girl.

Snowmen under the tree. Why?

I fought the urge to straighten that one candy cane because I knew I'd just end up ripping them all out in a passionate rage.

Santa in a helicopter. That's realistic.

Myth dispelled: Limiting yourself to only white lights does not guarantee a tasteful display.

These don't light up, so I took this with a flash and it STILL came out way creepy. I think Santa's buried under the lawn.

Fuck you, snowman.

And then this one house whose decorations I actually find appealing and festive without being too heinous or offensively stupid.