The neighbors are mounting ladders and setting their homes ablaze with lights and Santas. Here’s an amusing piece about one man’s commitment to being a colored lights man.
Me, I feel like I have enough on my plate already. If I’m going to labor on my home, I feel like the results should last four to five years, not three weeks. If I were to mount a five foot, rotating Santa on my lawn, it would just have to stay there until the kids went to college. Ditto for the reindeer on the roof.
Apt. 11d 
Well, you gotta do SOMETHING, or your kids won’t be able to hold their heads up on the block. Our boys (7 and 6, now) have been reasonably satisfied with a few strands of lights and changing the porch light to blue. But last year when the neighbors had theirs up and ours wasn’t up yet, they felt shame.
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You’ve got to go colored. White lights are the easy way out: they have taken over and taken most of the…well, color, out of Christmas lights. Stay away from those lame strands of white-light icicles. Go with the big, fat, multicolored stalwarts.
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I wish I’d known that was a Townhall link before clicking it–there’s some scary people over there.
But yes, down with tasteful white lights. Sooo boring! I personally love the obvious patchwork displays the most; one section of a roof done with a string of ancient huge green bulbs, the bushes netted with newer tiny multicolored lights (with one string that they can’t figure out how to make stop blinking) and a completely unrelated set of orangey-red lights outlining the bay window, which features a ceremic manger scene painted by Grandma in 1962. That’s Christmas!
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That’s funny, emjaybee. I forwarded that link to my very conservative daddy, who was annoyed at the author’s trivialization of Christmas. I just liked the author’s discussion of red and white lights, which is sort of politicallly neutral. Now if he had been talking about red v. blue lights that would have been different. I had to tell my dad to “lighten up.” Yuk.
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Oh, yes, this piece was fine, I was just startled to see the “townhall” in the URL when I clicked, because I’ve had some ranting raving librul-hatin’ pieces forwarded to me from there before…
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We actually do both the “lame strands of white-light icicles” and the “big, fat, multicolored stalwarts.” Icicles for the roof, big blinking multicolored lights on the porch. We put them up the day after Thanksgiving, but won’t turn them on until tonight. (A good thing we put them up when we did; it rained hard all weekend.) I have no idea if they look good together, but at least we didn’t leave any lights unplugged, which our kids would have considered a terrible sin.
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