In this festive time of the year, I enjoy the ubiquitousness of holiday decorations, but first a word about the word holiday. Christmas is designated as a holiday and spelled as such, however more and more retailers want to celebrate the holly-days, a more secular expression of the season. I suggest that we come to an agreement on this issue and call this time the holidays. If you want to have holly-days You can pretty much pick any date in January.
That said, Christmas is the perfect time to adorn your house and yard with all varieties of lights, animatronics, and mechanical characters. Lights are displayed in a variety of ways. Some people use lights to outline their house while others decorate their trees with festive twinklers. Some people prefer a variety of light colors while others stick to a one color policy.
Modern lights are very easy to use, inexpensive to operate, and give off no heat. When I was growing up we decorated our house with strings of C-9 lights. To save you the time of Googling C-9, these bulbs were about the size of a mango and threw off enough heat so that if you mistakenly decorated a dead tree with five strings of C-9s because you were a dumb kid and thought you were doing the folks a favor but the bulbs got so hot that they set the dead tree on fire. I don’t recommend using C-9s in a drought area. I’m just saying.
Animatronic characters have been a part of the lawn decorating scheme for several years. The most common ones are the waving Santa or the reindeer looking around. They are good old standbys in the decoration arena but for the most part, animated figures have been replaced by inflatables, and this is where I have to draw the line.
So far this year, I have seen inflatable Santa popping out of chimneys, flying helicopters, and riding motorcycles. I’ve seen giant inflatable snowmen, and Christmas trees, and sleighs with reindeer, and herds of elves. These inflatable figures are quite festive and may even bring a smile to your face when they are inflated, but most inflatable aficionados turn off the fans that power the figures during the day. This results in the figures collapsing into themselves so that Santa’s Workshop looks like it has been hit by a bomb, Frosty looks like global warming has done him in, and poor Santa winds up looking like he has suffered a heart attack and then been run over by a steamroller.
This is probably why I have never seen an inflatable nativity scene. It would be lovely at night but if you let the air out of baby Jesus during the day you are just asking for a lightning strike.
Now, go forth and decorate, remembering that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if your Christmas decorations are lame, everybody will know.
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