It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like... Tacky

[Author's note: I sent this to friends and family last Christmas, but it still applies.]

As my nearest and dearest are aware, I have no patience for the zeal with which people display the most god-awful Christmas decorations. When we drive past a particularly heinous display we will exclaim, with the joy of the season in our hearts, "Look honey! Christmas puked in their yard!"

The newest trend in the annual travesty of taste are those giant inflatable yard decorations. It started a few years ago with a puffy Santa, and has devolved into an absurd collage of holiday-spirit-cum-pop-culture. (Does anyone else have a problem with 10 foot tall Santa Homer or Reindeer Scooby Doo?) As new figures come on the market, some folks have gotten the bright idea to put out little groupings of them - some of which approach what I can only imagine are LSD induced nativity hallucinations. More than once we've joked about declaring open season on these earthbound Macy's parade rejects and driving around town with a pellet gun.

This year, one (well-intentioned, I'm sure) twit has outdone them all. Oddly enough for a season in which people strive to out-garish each other, this blunder is elegant in its simplicity. These aren't folks that shingled their roof with lights or filled their yard with plastic reindeer and blinking candy canes. They have a single inflatable Santa. And at some point, these folks must have asked themselves "how can we make the most of our lonely balloon Santa?" And then they must have gotten high, because their solution was... (drumroll please)... to suspend Santa from a tree.

Yep. A tree. The topmost rope is nearly 40 feet in the air, so this took some serious effort. And, while I assume they were going for a benign "father Christmas looking down on us all" motif, the result falls far short. There's a number of ropes going in various directions off Santa into the tree for a prisoner-on-the-rack effect, and for that special redneck touch they anchored his feet to a wheelbarrow. It's creepy in general, and is particularly disturbing when the wind blows, adding a Santa-having-a-seizure effect. When he's not inflated, it looks like a body that's been on the gallows for too long.

I desperately want to meet these people so I can ask them why they hung Santa in effigy.