Since my childhood the tacky light tour has been a family ritual, where all (or most--in later years Mom bowed out) of us would pile into a car, pick a neighborhood or two, and go in search of shining tackiness. Some neighborhoods, like our own, for instance, were too restrained to be any fun. Almost all white lights--maybe the occasional few windows with yellow or orange candles--and multicolored trees gleaming through the windows. Some neighborhoods were quite elegant, with large, red-bowed wreathes hung on a gable or on the windows, cleverly placed floodlights, and a few accenting white lights in windows or trees.
Other neighborhoods veered toward tack, with the multicolored strings tracing the house outline or a door, and perhaps a lit Santa or manger scene, and the appearance of blue candles in the windows.
Blue candles. That's one thing I've never understood about some folks' decorations. Why did they want Bunsen burners in the windows? What was the blue supposed to signify? What does Christmas have to do with natural gas? Perhaps in Louisiana or Texas I could possibly understand such a thing, but not New England. Hell, as a kid, I loved blinking lights. I wanted a whole tree full of blinkers. I thought steadily shining lights were useless and boring. Whenever Mom and Dad went to a holiday party, it was a given that they'd come home to a house with newly-installed blinking colored lights in the windows (except in Lisa and Julie's rooms, who didn't let me change them).
As the years went on, I noticed that we seemed to have fewer and fewer blinkers, until they were all gone. At some point I asked Mom about it and she said, "Yes, your Dad and I never replaced them when they burnt out. We don't have any more."
I was too old to be very disappointed, but I do remember feeling somewhat violated.
So anyway, looking for the most ridiculous, disproportionate, mismatched, overcrowded, garish and even creepy Christmas light job was a family sport. We found trailer parks and crowded semi-urban neighborhoods (crowded suburb-style neighborhoods do occur in central New Hampshire, and did even in the 80's) the best hunting grounds. There were some real decorative heroes there, including one trailer outlined entirely in blue light strings. And the blue strings had darkened bulbs moving along their length with regular timing, so that the trailer, with the blue lights strung along top, bottom and both sides, resembled a kind of tractor tread. This accompanied, of course, plenty of reindeer, at least a few Santas, and a couple of lit-up trees in the yard. This was the kind of masterpiece we could look forward to in rural New Hampshire. (And of course, we wondered what it did to the people's electricity bill--but that was obviously their problem.)
So here in Rhode Island, there's plenty of Christmas spirit to go around too. There area few streets and neighborhoods which I've noticed over the years have great holiday displays, and so last year, when Katie and I were still just dating (haven't gotten that far with the Pup & Ben series yet, but I will eventually...) Katie and I started down here in North Kingstown and then worked our way up to East Greenwich, where I'd lived for several years before moving into the condo. And we were pretty disappointed. Even those neighborhoods I'd known to be spectacular, were kind of half-assed this time around. Why? The horrible economy? Possibly...we saw some very classy homes in East Greenwich, of course, but not the smorgasbord of multicolored tastelessness we'd been expecting.
And then, after Christmas, up in New Hampshire for New Year's....we visited the same neighborhoods my family had gone to in my childhood, and had an even bigger letdown. Just like North Kingstown and East Greenwich...a very weak display. Were fewer people able to afford lights, or electricity, or even in the homes at all? It was hard to know...but like the lessened snow of recent years, the scarcity of Christmas lights seemed like a dimming of the entire holiday.
So just tonight, Kate and I went on this year's tacky lights tour, and we decided to try an area we'd never seen before. So we headed up to Warwick and Cranston, cities we drive past and through regularly, but almost never explore. (We saw a bit of Warwick last summer when we visited the Gaspee Days festival--and it was a great little area--but that's almost it.)
We drove up to that general area--too dark, and we too unfamiliar, to find the same little neighborhood again--and started following side streets where promising light displays led us. And there were a few winners. Blow-up snowmen, Santas and reindeer, wire-framed lit reindeer, polar bears and trees, lit "Merry Christmas" signs, chicken wire-type grids studded with lights and hung from the shrubs, and of course, strings and strings of light along windows, doors, gables, gutters, and sometimes tossed pretty strangely on trees.
We only took a few photos, but over the course of an hour and a half (which left us both shamefully tired) we wandered through enough blocks and side streets that we saw some quality chintz. No one street filled with competitive neighbors trying to outdo the rest, and the most overdone home we did find, the owner came out and asked if we were going to post our photos.
On principle, I'd rather not, but the layout was pretty sweet. Besides, the guy who was looking for some sort of publicity has no idea who I am or where I'm actually posting these photographs--so I'll be content with anonymity.
So! Enjoy the images of our Christmas light gawking...
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