Holiday Letdown

[ladysprite]

I have a confession to make. For a girl born and raised Jewish, converted to Asatru, and lapsed into a fuzzy kind of semi-pagan agnosticism, I have an inordinate fondness for the Christmas Holiday Season.

I'm not really all that interested in Christmas itself, honestly. But I love the season, mostly for its feel of ritual and celebration. I love winter, and snow, and decorations with sparkly lights and tinsel and shiny baubles. I love wreaths and mulled cider and baking coookies and coffee cakes, I love shopping for presents for everyone I can think of, and I love watching other people shop for presents. I love my snowman socks, and my Merry Grinchmas scrubs. I even love the holiday music - one of my favorite holiday treats is driving around looking at Christmas lights and listening to the radio playing Christmas carols.

And here we come to my current source of sadness. Apparently this year, everyone in my neighborhood has decided to decorate their house with plain white icicle lights. Every single house that has lights up. Plain, unimaginative, boring, uninspired little white lights. I suppose it's supposed to look elegant and sophisticated, and it's nice enough when one house does it, but when that's the only holiday decoration around it ends up looking bland, soulless, and vaguely dejected. The houses themselves even seem rather apologetic about the fact that they're not properly festive and colorful.

I've always limited my personal celebration of the season to binge-baking and Generic Winter Holiday gift-giving, out of respect for the fact that it's not really my holiday. But this year I may need to go out and buy some big, gaudy, rainbow-colored flashing lights to decorate my porch, just to forcibly inject some sincere, unsophisticated cheer into my neighborhood....

Comments

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Go Becky! Bright colours are so you. :)

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

I like the Christmas Holiday Season, too.

And I encourage you to go for the gaudy lights. You are, after all, the PERKY Goth. :-)

[braider.livejournal.com]

Buy the colored lights. Be a rebel, and bring soul back into Christmas.

[johnprester.livejournal.com]

Ever really pay attention to the middle part of A Christmas Carol? The Spirit of Christmas Present is pretty aggresively pagan.

Go for it. Colored lights, big plastic sleigh and reindeer on the roof, outside speakers blaring carols day and night...with not a word of apology (at least not until the police come).

[pagawne.livejournal.com]

Christmas comes in two parts, the pagan and the Christian. It is the only place where they seem to coexist happily. I wish there were more. Becky, for heavens sake, get a BUNCH of colored lights and string them up. That neighborhood needs them.

[rabbitorf.livejournal.com]

you should see it out here! i don't think i've ever seen so many inflatable lawn ornaments and flashy things. My favorite so far are the big snow globes that are always snowing on frosty.

[jtdiii.livejournal.com]

I guess you would find my home town worriesome then. The entire downtown is decorated with a single candle in each window facing the street. The wild ones have strands of white lights strung around garlands of greenery and red bows drapped in long loops along the white picket fences, and wreaths hung on the windows.

There is one non-conformist with blinking white clusters of white lights and another who used strings of red lights to outline a tree.

Having grown up with this, it does look rather classic and Currier and Ives. By comparison, the next town over with their blinking colored lights and inflated lawn ornaments seems a bit tacky...

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

That sounds nice! My philosophy in this regard has devolved into "don't put up any external display that you'd be embarrassed to leave up after Christmas" because sometimes we get busy/lazy right after the holidays. Our strings of star lights in the front window would probably escape notice; the neighbors' inflatable snowglobe, OTOH, would be pretty conspicuous :-D

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

I think there's a middle ground. I have no love for plastic santas and inflatable snow globes, and if the houses around here had garlands and bows to go with the lights I'd probably be more than happy.

But an entire neighborhood of plain white icicle lights with nothing else doesn't quite seem classic, it seems.... Stepfordish. I like color, and enthusiasm, and that's lacking here.

[jtdiii.livejournal.com]

Heh,

Guilford is the type of town that stepford was trying to emulate... Quaint old New England with four churches and a reading room clustered around the town green. The greenery and the bows add the color not the lights. Done properly it has a rather warm feeling to it.

I will take some pictures.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I remember when those white icicle lights first came out. Everyone went nutso over them, and the result was pretty much what you're describing here, all over the city. And I felt just the way you do -- that a house here and there doing the all-white thing is pretty, but a whole street full of them is boring as hell.

Funny thing, though... after about 2 years, we started seeing colors again. I think a lot of people got tired, either of the sameness or of looking like they couldn't do anything but follow the latest Hot Trend. And now we see some houses doing all-white, and some doing riotous color, and it's a nice mix. So if you can get thru this year and maybe next year, it should get better.

I'm pretty sure you can get icicle lights in multicolor these days. That would be nicely subversive. :-)

[bardling.livejournal.com]

I actually like the white lights best of all (and particularly like icicle formation) - they're closest to the real thing: candles. I'll take coloured, if I have to, but I hate blinking stuff & tacky stuff. But hey - it's your place to decorate as you like. :)

[wren13.livejournal.com]

Hey, I never decorate anymore, and I have a box of colored lights in my basement. Want them?

[multigeek.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on the white lights, especially the icicle lights. We have a bunch of multi-colored lights, but we haven't gotten them up yet. We've removed a bunch of the bushes that I used to put them on, so I'll have to figure out a different strategy.

Christmas Ritual

[multigeek.livejournal.com]

I'm not surprised that you find Christmas appealing, even though you're not into the Jesus side of it. People seem to have an innate attraction to ritual, and boy does Christmas have ritual. And it's not some stuffy church ritual; it's happy-music, bright-lights, and fun-gifts ritual.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

I remembered seeing it one one side of houses, across a river in Philadelphia, so you could see the houses' outlines from across the water, and it was really neat.

I never thought of it as being particularly neat for the *front* side of houses... oh well.

I think some nice, gaudy, blinky lights might be just the thing to set off the neighborhood.