It’s December, and that means ladders, cursing, and tripped circuit breakers—outdoor holiday decorations are here. If you’re lucky, as you walk or drive around your neighborhood, you’ll note a display that truly impresses with its creativity, style, scale, or attention to detail. But mostly, you’ll see these:
The Mini-Rockefeller. For homeowners who have at least one big ol’ evergreen on their front lawn, the Mini-Rockefeller setup offers a sweet but inferior version of the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. It requires lots of stringed lights, a tall ladder, and a casual disregard for personal safety. But it’s all worth it when the work is done, and the comments come pouring in from friends and family: “That tree isn’t really straight, is it?” and “I liked it better last year” and of course, the venerable “You missed a spot.” There’s something special about the way all that effort takes whatever flaws your tree may have—crookedness, bare patches, browning—and amplifies them, with 150 lumens of unwanted attention.
The Spider’s Web. Homeowners who have only deciduous trees need not despair; they too can fully participate in tree-lighting, with the additional flexibility to put in as much or as little work as desired. We’ve all seen the dazzling results of painstaking efforts by homeowners who carefully wrap every bare branch–and that’s great, even if they make the rest of us look bad by comparison. But if you’re in a hurry, or just don’t care that much, you can deploy “The Spider’s Web,” in which a tangle of lights are tossed into a tree to hang randomly among the branches, perhaps ready to catch any stray elves carrying presents, or even snag the fat man himself on Christmas Eve.
The Gift-Wrapped House is easy to identify—it’s similar in concept to a holiday car commerical, with that luxury sedan sitting in a driveway, draped in a giant ribbon and bow. But with The Gift-Wrapped House, there are no actual ribbons or bows (they’re replaced with strings of lights), and the appearance of the house as a gift isn’t intentional. The impression results from the thorough but unimaginative outlining of the edges of the house with strings of lights, so that the contours of its shape, a square or rectangle, are emphasized (the effect doesn’t work as well with peaked roofs). This makes the house look like a giant box, and if you maybe just squint a little… presto, it’s a gift-wrapped house.
The Santa Landing Pad requires homeowners to concentrate the bulk of their holiday light allocation on the roof. But once that commitment is made, the possibilities are endless: a remote airport landing strip, or maybe a luxury rooftop helicopter pad, outlined in red, white, or green guide lights? Whatever it takes to prevent Santa accidentally flying into a chimney head-on. I mean, the driver of the sleigh and his lead reindeer are regularly depicted with bright red noses—who knows how many times Christmas may have been saved by a Santa Landing Pad before?
Increasingly popular over the last decade are the projection-based decorations known as Lazy Lights. I don’t know if that’s their official name, but if you search for “Lazy Lights,” Google and Amazon seem to know what you mean. Except for the possible need to run an extension cord, this method requires nothing but a purchase and a plop on the ground outside your home.
They, too, come in several varieties. For example, there are the swirling circles of Christmas, with two or more spotlights dancing around each other, sometimes crossing and overlapping. It’s reminiscent of the moments before the opening curtain at an old-time Broadway show, except that inside these projected circles are pictures of snowflakes, or Santa Claus, or the Grinch. It all seems to building toward something, but nothing ever comes, and the pattern just repeats. Now, spoiled for a proper ending, part of me needs to see Santa, or even Kool-Aid Man, burst out through the front of one of those houses.
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Many people are unaware that in 1988, George H.W. Bush surreptitiously delivered a challenge to American ingenuity and innovation, much like John F. Kennedy’s famous challenge to land on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Wisely, Bush didn’t attach a date to his goal—this required more advanced technology and research than mere spaceflight—but I like to think that before he died in 2018, he got to see his “thousand points of light” come to fruition, in the form of projector lights in every suburb of America.
These Lazy Lights project hundreds—or even a thousand—tiny, equally distanced light points, in one of several colors. I’ve seen nice usage of green lights aimed up into high treetops, making it look like a large group of fireflies had taken up residence. But usually the lights are pointed right at the front of a house for maximum ground-level optical stimulation.
Last year, a homeowner in my neighborhood made the unfortunate choice of having hundreds of red lights projected onto his home, which made it look like the SWAT team was about to “light up the house” with tracer fire at any moment.
Also popular in recent years are plug-in inflatable decorations, many of which feature moving parts, music, and even clips from classic Christmas cartoons. If you’ve ever fretted that passersby are not lingering in front of your house long enough, or worried that they’re not being entertained as they should be, or if you just enjoy watching dogs freak out when faced with unnatural, unpredictable motions… then inflatables are for you.
While evenings are usually the stuff of inflatable splendor, Halloween isn’t yet a distant memory, and a simple wind anchor coming loose from the ground can take Santa emerging from a wooden outhouse—a disturbing image at the best of times—and reframe it as Santa rising from what looks a lot like a coffin. Mrs. Claus’s mouth, moving in time with Christmas carols playing from the nearby speakers, becomes a creepy sight when she’s crumpled on one side, in her death throes. By day, lawns strewn with deflated inflatables resemble Christmas graveyards, with all of your favorite holiday characters flattened like cartoon roadkill.
Despite my criticisms, I do love these lighting traditions. I love the big, Las Vegas-in-Hamilton approach that says, “Enough isn’t enough until someone has a seizure.” I also mentally award one house each year with a Charles Schulz-inspired “most sincere” holiday display.
But at home, I take the laziest of all ways out, by avoiding outdoor displays altogether. I doubt I could tell the difference between a C9 classic light bulb and C4 plastic explosive, but luckily, many other people devote time, money, and dedication to creating spectacles of light and wonder. Martel’s Christmas Wonderland opened the day after Thanksgiving, and Hamilton’s Winter Wonderland is Dec. 3 and 4, with Kuser Park lit up the rest of the month. ABC’s Great Christmas Light Fight is on TV.
Enjoy the season. You may need your sunglasses at night.
Peter Dabbene’s website is peterdabbene.com, and his previous Hamilton Post columns can be read at communitynews.org. His latest work, “Call Waiting,” can be seen at idleink.org. His book, “Complex Simplicity” collects the first 101 editions of this column, along with essays and material published elsewhere. It is now available at Amazon or Lulu.com for $25 (print) or $4.99 (ebook).
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