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| Visible from space. |
My husband really loves decorating for Christmas and I love letting him decorate for Christmas. He’s good at it and I’m not, so it works.
We have two trees inside that are, sadly, artificial. It just doesn’t work for us anymore to bring my worst allergen into the house. I do love the sight and smell of real Christmas trees and, ahem, pine for one.
Husband does a beautiful job on the indoor decorations, just like his mother used to before him.
Every few years, my mother-in-law would plan a new color scheme and re-Christmas-decorate. It was always a highlight of our annual holiday visit to see what she’d done.
We’d usually arrive very late at night, but she would leave the tree lights on for us. It was magical.
She’s gone now, and her son carries on the tradition. When she moved out of her house, some of her Christmas things were dispersed to family. My sister has one of my mother-in-law’s trees and decorates it with angels. I can’t wait to see the tree next week when we visit my sister and her family.
One of my husband’s favorite Christmas traditions is for us to put the kids in the car and drive around looking at all the house lights.
People in my area do it up right, if by “do it up right” you mean put up a whole lot of glowing what-not in their yards.
Last year we thought the number of houses decorating outside had decreased. This year the numbers appear to be way up and I hope that’s a good sign.
Tonight we bundled the children into the car. They are too big for footie pajamas now, but we still drank hot chocolate and listened to some Christmas music on the radio.
This year’s navigating was so easy compared to previous years. We planned out a route using tackylighttour.com and programmed our selections into the GPS on his smart phone. So much better than the year all the co-pilots fell asleep while the directions home were on a piece of paper we printed off the computer.
One of my buddies has a great tour planning strategy–she goes to one of the “famous” tacky tour houses and waits for a limo to pull up. People rent every limo in town this month to get a guided tour without having to drive themselves. These are professional tours.
Once a limo leaves, my friend follows in her car and gets led from house to marvelous house. Pretty smart!
Here’s a selection of some of the tacky lights houses we saw tonight.
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| A small house in a modest neighbor goes all out. |
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| Blurry, but I think it captures how it feels. |
Do people decorate outside very much where you are from? Do you? 
There is a very tacky house around the corner from me. The man who lives there was so happy when my kids showed up this fall and asked to rake his leaves- it meant he could get started on lights sooner, if he just paid them. They loved the dough, and now they love to look at his tacky lights. It's a win-win.
My husband does our outside lights and he does a great job. I generally handle the indoors. We had a great tacky house in our old VA Beach neighborhood. And it was just around the corner from us. The sky just glowed. 🙂
We live out in the country, so there are no lights! This is the first year (in 7) that we put up outside lights, and they are beautiful.
Christmas Eve we are going to an early church service, then out to eat and drive around looking at lights. We will be over 20 miles from home, so we should be able to hit some wonderful sites!
Too funny! Groan about your "pining" for a Christmas tree – your are too punny! I didn't even know that people rented limos to look at lights, I guess I am pretty clueless. So I never would have thought to follow one around, but now the secret is out. I bookmarked the tacky lights website, but they only list two places within 100 miles of us (and they are barely within 100 miles). Maybe next year, they'll add more. One of the local news stations list popular places to look at lights though.
I love tacky at Christmas. I like that "Now there's a happy house." feeling.
@ Maureen, I don't know if every town has a limo-lights thing, but it's a big deal here.
I don't know that it's the best idea ever. Some of the decorated houses are in cul-de-sacs and it's a problem for the big cars to navigate.
@Kim, perhaps I'll post a picture of our Happy House. It's very happy, but not Clark-Griswald happy.