décor

I was equally shocked and relieved upon arriving at the parent-house to see that my father's habit of recent years to attempt to compete (or mock) some other residents of the street in their excessive festive illuminatory embarrassments has ceased. The last time we were here for christmas he had an eight-foot inflatable Santa, an illuminated inflatable robin, numerous strings or nets of random-coloured lights (none of which matched as they were all bought in different January sales at various garden centres and hardware shops), a set of illuminated vibration-sensing snowmen which played an irritating little tune when someone walked past and a set of five things in a tree which were meant to be robins but which resembled penguins. According to picture messages sent in the two intervening years by my sister the situation had worsened slightly but this year there's a tree in the front room, a tree-shape made out of various bits of cheap lighting-stuff in the bedroom above and almost nothing else though Nicky did present them with a leftover illuminated pinecone-based wreath after she made some to flog at a crafty-fair-thing at her office. Driving up to the house I'd thought the usual amount of illuminations were in place but it turned out to be the farside neighbour who has recently taken to introducing garish colour to his previously slightly more dignified all-white light collection. Despite the father-reasoning that he was taking the piss out of the people who took it seriously any large collection of random illuminated christmas tat tends to emit an air of pikeydom. On the way over we passed through Metheringham where for several years there's been a house which is so heavily beset by illuminated christmas-related shite that it looks as if it's selling them; this year a few other houses in the village appeared to be attempting to join in or compete. Rather than the shame of bad taste I would rather my family didn't do such things for sound ecological reasons and was planning on watching the rate at which their electricity meter span when all the lights were activated to estimate the cost of running them and am thus glad that the opportunity did not arise.