8,000 watts of Holiday Cheer
December 12, 2015 9:14 AM   Subscribe

 
I live sort of near all this stuff. These people are batshit.

Also, title should more properly be "8,000 amps" or some such.
posted by nevercalm at 10:22 AM on December 12, 2015


I still miss the guy on the street near ours who did a modified slightly more low key version of this. I think of his Xmas decorations every time I pass his house. And he moved out ten years ago.
posted by bearwife at 10:26 AM on December 12, 2015


We'll always have Collingwood Lights in my hometown of Alexandria, VA. It's truly impressive and a hell of a good time.
posted by capricorn at 10:43 AM on December 12, 2015


I purchased a house where the previous owner was over the top for Halloween and Christmas. I did not know that at the time. The first year we were there, there were so many people driving slowly by our house and we could not figure out why. Then, about 5 of them over the course of a few days had the guts to come ring our bell. They mostly asked if everything was ok. We finally figured it out. One woman had pictures of her kids in front of the house through the years. Every year they would take another picture as sort of a mark on the wall of watching their kids grow. The kids were like 14 or 15 that year and were waiting in the car. Boy were they happy when they were told they did not have to take the picture again. Interestingly enough, they came back the next day and did take the picture. THe woman said it was the kid's choice. They secretly loved the pictures.
posted by AugustWest at 10:48 AM on December 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


I almost feel like crazy holiday displays expected by the public should be a required real estate disclosure. Now that the idea of one of "those" people selling their house at some point before their death has occurred to me as being a thing that happens. It makes perfect sense that it would happen, of course, but my first exposure to this was through the OG Christmas Light nutter Jennings Osborne himself.
posted by wierdo at 11:20 AM on December 12, 2015


I almost feel like crazy holiday displays expected by the public should be a required real estate disclosure

And for the people across the street so they can buy blackout curtains!
(Only half joking)

I lived next to a minor (meaning there were still parts of the lawn you could walk on...) light display for a number of years.

Lovely neighbors, quiet family.
But having people slooowly cruise by your house in the middle of the night, pull into your driveway and hop out "for a quick photo", trample across your yard to get a better view...
It can get tiring.

On the other hand, the Halloween display was pretty cool, since it was basically like moths to a flame, with our house getting the overflow.
We got so many cute kids at the door those years, that when the neighbors moved out, Halloween just wasn't the same.
posted by madajb at 11:54 AM on December 12, 2015


There's a short semicircular street in Seattle where they do this called "Candy Cane Lane", and it's very popular.

My partner and I were at a grocery store (PCC-Ravenna, now closed) fairly near it one mid-December night, so we decided to park on the other side of a little bridge closed to vehicular traffic and walk down to Candy Cane Lane to see what it looked like free of the interference of car windows.

Within about five minutes I was half-asphyxiated by exhaust fumes from the bumper-to-bumper traffic inching around the circle at a fraction of walking pace, and I didn't really recover fully until the next morning; we were the only people dumb enough to attempt it on foot that night while we were there, but it's hard for me to believe that the people inside the houses were experiencing anything even approaching healthy air quality.
posted by jamjam at 12:07 PM on December 12, 2015


Some of those places in Dyker Heights are actually kind of tasteful - there's a cohesive design aesthetic on display, even if it's a bit over the top.

This place by where my wife grew up is a bit more towards the insane side. It's just a bunch of stuff, with home made painted plywood cutouts of random cartoon characters. What do the Little Mermaid and Shrek have to do with Christmas?
posted by LionIndex at 1:15 PM on December 12, 2015


I try to round up a couple friends and head down to Dyker Heights each year to check the lights out. We always get someone who's never seen them before somehow, and it's great fun blowing their minds.

The first time I went was in the company of a favorite ex, and when he took one look at this display of white-clad animatronic children in various ice skating poses and dubbed it "The Skating Party Of The Damned" I fell a tiny bit more in love.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:27 PM on December 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


A nice display doesn't require a million lights or any. But who am I? I suppose if you have the cash and want to celebrate the holidays with the fossil fuel industry and Chinese manufacturing, it is your choice!
posted by Muncle at 5:02 PM on December 12, 2015


When we bought our house earlier this year it didn't occur to us that we might end up in the part of town that goes batshit crazy for this stuff. But we did. The street just around the corner regularly wins the local prizes for Christmas lights (I didn't even know there were local prizes). So far the inconvenience has been minimal: a little more traffic, but more people seem to park nearby and do the loop on foot, and yeah, we really notice lately if our blackout curtains aren't quite shut properly when we go to bed. On the plus side, walking home from the bus stop is now brightly lit and full of people, and the 10 minute walk has built-in entertainment.

I really wonder how much it is costing people in power bills, though. We live in an area with a very high unemployment rate and high cost of living, so it can't be easy to add extra expenses this time of year.
posted by lollusc at 5:17 PM on December 12, 2015


Talk about overkill.
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 10:51 PM on December 12, 2015


Years ago, my sister was going to move to Peacock Lane in Portland, but things fell through. I'm still sad about it.
posted by klausman at 10:55 PM on December 12, 2015


LEDs are a total game changer for this kind of thing. Just finished setting up a display for the gardens where I work that involved around 300 strands of mini lights, 2,000 feet of c9 lights (bulbs about 1.5 inches long) and a bunch of up lights. Putting it together took weeks and involved installing new electric circuits but it turns out that the most electrically demanding feature we put in were two 100 cup coffee urns to serve hot chocolate. You can fit only two of them on a standard 20 Amp circuit.

The other great thing about LED is that they're set up so if a single bulb fails, you don't lose the entire strand or your mind when you're spending hours trying to find the one defective bulb in the strand while standing on a ladder in the cold.

And I'll say this: people really love holiday lights. Some of our harshest critics have been gushing.
posted by sciencegeek at 11:25 PM on December 12, 2015


People up the street from me do a mostly home-made Christmas display, not so many lights but lots of cut outs and assorted other stuff. This year they have the weirdest decoration of all, not one but two life-size cuttouts of Bigfoot wearing a christmas hat and carrying a bell with a bow. I love it, I want one! Bigfoot is always appropriate, whatever the holiday.
posted by mermayd at 11:16 AM on December 13, 2015


Okay: here is my album from last year's jaunt. I'll also post this year's after we go (we're going tonight).

One of my friends last year referred to this as "The Sigmund And The Sea Monsters house".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:19 AM on December 13, 2015


Meanwhile, in Birmingham Alabama...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:36 PM on December 13, 2015


Just got back in from this year's jaunt - the neighborhood featured some repeats from previous years, but we also discovered a handful of houses had adopted this LED pinspot-array projector thing, strategically placed in their front yards to project onto the houses; the effect was a carpet of twinkly lights blanketing the facade of the house without having to actually string a carpet of twinkly lights. However, if they were angled slightly off, they would project onto the driveway, the sidewalk, neighbors' houses...my friend made me take a picture of her standing in the midst of one such display, and dubbed the resulting effect "Light Measles".

We also came up with a rating system based on what she called "the food groups" of displays - inflatable sculptures, animatronic displays, white lights, colored lights, statues, and music. We prowled the neighborhood until we found one with all elements.

There was also a house with a STAR WARS motif - Darth, Yoda, Artoo and a stormtrooper all arrayed on the stoop. Yoda had a Santa hat. The house next door, though, had a huge inflatable sculpture of Santa holding a fish - next to a snowman in an orange vest and holding a gun. A family walked up while we were looking at it and the kids said 'ooh, mom, take our pictures so it looks like we're holding the gun!" And my friend and I eyed them as they posed, and when the woman cheerfully asked if we wanted our picture taken with the gun too, we politely declined.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:02 PM on December 13, 2015


Oh, ha, the Gothamist link has pictures of the Star Wars house and the huntin' snowman...whoops. Heh. Hadn't seen those before we head out.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:07 PM on December 13, 2015


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