Yard Decorations: No One Cares
Photo Editor Grace Kendall

On the day after Thanksgiving, I found myself being stared down by a beady-eyed Rudolph. “Oh no,” I thought, “It’s starting. Holiday yard crap is starting to emerge.”

Every year, Black Friday marks the day where anxious mothers scour the shelves of K-Mart for bottom-dollar deals, and fathers spend an afternoon stringing thin strips of lights around the entire outline of their house and filling their lawns with plastic figures. Yard decorations are a tacky, inescapable tradition of spectacle that comes in full force but once a year. Even if your house isn’t decorated, you can guarantee that several down the road will be glowing every night, ready to induce holiday nausea from 6 p.m. until you wake up in the morning.

In an age of innovation, it’s all too easy to find distinctive decorations for your yard. Some of the most popular choices are awkward inflatable objects, glowing plastic figurines, herds of reindeer, and enough lights to turn even the most Podunk town into Times Square. They’re expensive to buy, a pain to put up, but it’s practically a holiday requirement to fill your lawn with junk.

First, there are large inflatable figures. Tall enough to hide a house, these balloons allow everyone the pleasure of having a bit of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade right in their front lawn. The inflatable snow globes are currently the hottest decoration trend; fake snow whirls around the large plastic dome forming a veritable blizzard around a stoic central figure, like a snowman or Santa. Others choose to display inflatable figures such as the Grinch, which never actually resemble the creature they are attempting to replicate. The most fun of the inflatable creatures, though, is when they deflate. Instead of a spirited holiday display, it’s a collapsed Santa carcass adorning the lawn. Happy holidays, indeed.

For those who celebrate a religiously-based Christmas, nativity scenes are the central decorating element. Small wooden nativity scenes can be acceptably classy decorations, but few choose to go this route. Instead, families opt for the plastic light-up nativity scene, the kind where Mary and Joseph have giant alien plugs in their backs and the Baby Jesus glows like a nightlight. The accompanying animals are where people truly go overboard, though; I used to live next to a house where a family of crows, a few penguins, and a circus-escapee elephant all attended the birth of Jesus.
Reindeer are to be another popular choice for yard adornments. In some ‘upscale’ neighborhoods, decorations are restricted so as to keep with the elegant stylings of the elite, and white lights and white wooden reindeer seem to be the only decorations deemed permissible. These white reindeer do not resemble animals so much as curved sawhorses with bows on them, but they’re popular nonetheless. The rule here: two deer are okay, two hundred are not.

Lights are without a doubt the staple of all holiday decorations. Draped in trees, swooped around bushes, outlining the perimeter of every roof in the neighborhood – lights are inescapable. White lights are generally for the rich, and large colorful bulbs are for families. Some blink, some cascade, and others just shine all night and into the morning. The type of lights used doesn’t matter so much as how many there are and which directions they’re moving. Lights on the bushes shouldn’t be blinking when the lights on the roof are marching; it’s literally painful to watch and can even drive passer-bys to illness.

The worst offense of all, though, is the power of combination. A moving Santa will fly behind his dozen flashing reindeer over a light-up nativity scene that is flanked by – surprise! – more reindeer. Lights blink in every tree, angels flap their wings furiously in every window, and an inflatable penguin surveys the scene from its place of prominence next to the chimney. There is a cheaply made PowerPoint slide projecting, “Happy holidays!” onto the garage door and a second Santa waving madly on the roof. It is holiday decoration overdose, and it’s spreading like wildfire. Everyone has to outdo their neighbor’s decorations, so more lights and snowmen get added to the collection every year.

The holidays are a fun time of spirit and fun, but yard decorations have gotten completely out of hand. No wonder holiday ‘scavenger hunts’ are so popular; with so much garbage in everybody’s yard, who’s going to care if a glowing shepherd goes missing? Do everyone a favor this year and keep your yard simple, because trust me: nobody really cares.