The War on Christmas... Lights -- A Fair and Impartial Poll

As for personal commentary: Intellectually, I wish I could embrace LED lights. I tell myself that the cooler, blue look is wintery and appropriate. But I instinctively recoil from them, nonetheless.

Also, I realized I forget to add an option to the poll, which would be to register the deep wrongness of mixing incandescent and LED, especially in outdoor displays. That ought to be classed right up there with brown shoes and black slacks.

Or LEDs in larger globes. There really aren't a lot of christmas lights I don't like, but I like vivid colors.

I also forgot the newish option of the laser light show in place of house-lining lights. When I first saw the "mostly green dots with a few red dots" thing a couple of years ago on a house in my neighborhood, I thought it was pretty neat. Then the next year it was on like a third of all the houses, and no longer seemed half as neat. But I did see someone last year who didn't project on their house but rather onto a stand of trees, which gave the thing a fresh, new effect.

ETA: Also, science has create bio-luminescent tobacco and cotton and mice. Where is my mutant green-glowing Christmas tree?

Option 5. And may I add, if you don't have your lights on a fucking photo sensor and/or timer, you can get bent. If you can afford lights you can afford to have them shut off at a time when nobody will see or appreciate them anyway.

I don't know if it's really "tacky", but we'd go check out all the lights around Times Square and Rockefeller Center multiple times every year, so that's my default 'acceptable' level of holiday lighting / decoration.  Which has led to a lot of disappointment most years, because for some reason, most towns won't devote enough of their budget to making that sort of thing happen.

I like lights, but I'm not a fan of those inflatable things. I used to live a few blocks from this house:
www.syracuse.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/12/degroot_family_baldwinsville_christmas_lights.html

It started as a few, then a half dozen, inflatable characters. They used to be confined to the fenced in area where their pool is, and our family took to calling it "the menagerie". Since we moved away, it's just gotten out of hand and taken over their whole yard. Coming around the corner to see that 30' reindeer looming behind the house is more unnerving than festive.

I might make an exception, for the house I pass by now that has an inflatable dinosaur Santa on their roof, because that's kind of adorable.

Someone on my street has those small, hanging strings of light in green all along the side of their house. They're lit up in order and I believe it's supposed to have a kind of rainfall effect. But instead it looks like the house is swarming with bright green bugs.

It's pretty cool.

Bubble lights. My uncle and aunt had them when I was a kid, and I found some reproductions a couple years ago. I do have a soft spot for both those thumb sized bulbs from the 60's, and the old skinny antique bulbs I used to see now and again, where the entire string goes dark when one bulb burns out.

Speaking of the 60's, when I was a little kid, my folks bought one of those shiny aluminum trees with the light with the revolving multicolored lenses. We were told that if we ever hung any electric lights on it, we would immediately be electrocuted, and the house would burn down. So we had a couple dozen satin covered Styrofoam balls for ornaments. It was all pretty lame, but now I guess vintage aluminum trees go for real money.

Maybe my favorite Christmas tree memory as a kid is one snowy December (before the aluminum tree) when our neighbor, the old WWI vet brought his tractor and a sled over, and he and my dad took me back in our woods and we cut a fresh tree and hauled it up to the house.

Does anybody else spend the week after Thanksgiving untangling the python ball of last years lights like we used to do when I was a kid, or do most people just toss them out every year and buy new ones?

There is a house on the way to town that always has lots of those inflatable characters in their yard out by the road. At night they are inflated and lit up, but if you go by there during the day it looks like a drive-by massacre at the North Pole.

There's also a local doctor who, with his family, each year makes elaborate gingerbread villages and displays them in one public building or another. It's pretty cool.

Oh my god, this might be the topic about which I have the most IMPORTANT, CORRECT, and DEEPLY-FELT opinions.

First off, incandescent and multi-colored, all the way.  Old-skool, C7/C9, the opaque big bulbs for outside and translucent small ones on the tree inside.  I don't understand why science can't make LEDs that match that look, now that they've created incandescent-quality CFL bulbs.  GET ON THIS, SCIENCE.  Because I'm also of the panicky belief that if I connect more than two incandescent strings together, I will cause my house to burn down, with all my Christmas presents in it.  Which brings me to...

...Stately Dick n Hisses Manor is guilty as charged, of combining incandescent and LED into one hideous, mish-mash outdoor display.  ::SOBS INCONSOLABLY::  You see, we have a big, elegant fence around our 20x24 foot rectangular garden in the middle of our front yard.  And it cries out to have colored lights draped all around it.  But it's too big to drape with incandescent lights if I'm being cautious of burning down my house with all my presents in it!  So, as soon as Big Christmas started manufacturing LEDs in the same size and shape as the old C9 incandescents, we broke down.  But I hate LEDs, so we kept the incandescent lights and expanded our decorations to include one of the trees in the orchard next to the garden, so now we have a rectangle of hideous LEDs and one delightful spot of three strings (flirting with danger!) of glorious old-fashioned CORRECT lights swagged in the crabapple tree.  (There's only space to plug in two extension cords in our front yard, and I'm not about to guarantee my Christmas presents get destroyed in an inferno by doing something crazy like using splitters or whatever.)

With regards to energy usage, I am meticulous about energy conservation in 99.9% of my life, but when it comes to Christmas everything goes out the window.  Lights on, all the time!  (I turn them off before bed.  I'm not a monster.)  The more energy-inefficient, the better!  No recycling wrapping paper, dammit!  And I want a fresh-cut, real tree, and lots of evergreen boughs cut into garlands and wreaths!  Let's raze entire forests for my holiday cheer!!

Many of the newfangled decoration options offend me deeply.  I can't abide those blowup things AT ALL.  The worst one in my neighborhood is this one house that has their entire front yard absolutely crammed with the things... and is immediately next door to a funeral home.  (I agree with Floyd Diabolical Barber , though, that it's hilarious to see them looking like they've been skinned and had their insides carted off when you go by during the day.)  Those house projection things, in hideous laser-hued green-blue, are so awful when used on a house, especially when multiple houses on the street have the same one.  But they look startlingly cool when projected on trees, so I'll give that usage a pass.  I'm not a fan of the nets of lights, for lazily draping over shrubs.  People should have to labor to swag their lights artfully in their shrubbery, the way Jesus intended!  Those nets just look crappy.  And I'm still not entirely sure I approve of icicle lights, to give an idea of how far back I'm still going when defining "newfangled".