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Christmas Display Goes Horribly Awry

While walking to the bus stop every day, I see a good number of Christmas displays, some more impressive than others and some tackier than others. It wasn't until today that I noticed one simply more terrifying than others.

Until this point, my Christmas display-related amusement was relegated to a small house half a block from where I meet the bus. There was previously nothing remarkable about the house's other holiday decorations (skeletons around Halloween, turkeys for Thanksgiving), but over the course of a week, the proprietors slowly pieced together a gaudy plastic (glowing, at night!) nativity scene with Joseph, Mary, 3 Wise Men, and the little Baby Jesus.

It existed in full for about 2 days before gradually tragedy struck. Over the course of another week, I realized the figures were being systematically knocked over, one by one, until the only things left were Baby Jesus and Mother Mary.

"A thought-provoking analysis of Christianity's true heart – the love between mother and son?" I wondered.

A few days later, Jesus and Mary were knocked over too, but a life-sized inflatable snowglobe with moving parts and snowing snow had been erected next to them. A day after that, everything was uprighted.

This new house, though, beats all. I only get a chance to see it in passing while the bus whizzes mercifully by, but there are a few key elements that it encompasses which make it, in my mind, the pinnacle of bad Christmas displays:

  1. This house has a giant yard. With a giant yard comes more creepy figurines. Somehow, it also means (overall) more creepy figurines per square foot. Ouch.
  2. One of the creepy figurines is a giant inflatable Homer Simpson dressed like Santa. While this monstrosity is already heinous, given his oddly-wrinkled smoker-mouth and eyes lolling in the back of his skull, this Homer Simpson is only partially inflated for God knows what reason, giving him a disturbingly withered, scoliotic appearance.
  3. There is also what appears to be a "Persistence of Time"-inspired ginormous uninflated inflatable Santa draped hanging half off the garage into the muddy lawn beneath. It's as if Santa Claus, frustrated with the commercialization of his likeness, bellyflopped out of his sleigh one tragic evening high above Queens and pancaked himself into a flaccid mess of plastic and the crumpled dreams of children everywhere.
  4. Keeping with that theme, further down the roof is a triangular battalion of cherubic 3' tall toy soldiers, all marching in step toward the precipitously close edge of the roof. I don't really know my stance on euthanasia, but in this case, who would blame them?

Poor, poor Christmas.  

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