Here's the place to post links of outrageous Christmas houses.
This one will make your head explode

I actually like the way This Christmas House uses the windows of the house in an effective way.

I think Clark Griswold has had an enormous effect on a great many people. But at least Clark had the good taste to stop with lights. Oh my god. What gay music. I have to admit, I would be Cousin Eddy riding drunk on the back of a flatbed truck doing a drive-by shotgunning of those much-too-schmaltzy snowmen and piggy elfs. Oh my god. That is not Bing Crosby crooning. That even makes me pine for Wham. I mean, throw in at least a little "Jesus is the reason for the season." Without it, you get complete schmaltz like this. That is truly horrible. That one might give me nightmares.

Right. My head just about exploded.

Yes, that other house is better, but the music still makes me want to gag.

My head exploded less than ten seconds into watching that first video.

Ten seconds. A new record. I had to listen to the music a second to see where it was going. It got worse. By then it was too late and I had already projectiled onto the monitor.

LOL!
The thing that SLAYS me about the first video is how DESPERATELY cheerful the music is. It's literally manic. So up-with-people and New Main Street Singers. And then when it cuts back to the creepy animatronic elf, that's when I blew chunks. I guess you didn't stay with it to the point where they "slow things down." And go all multicultural, wishing happy Hanukkah and Kwanza and Happy Holidays... Oh god, the dry heaves... the dry heaves...

Watching that TLC show, you notice that local police departments have gotten smart and completely close off traffic on streets around some of these houses. I remember the squealing brakes and satisfying "ka-chunk!" of metal on metal when my local Christmas house claimed victim after victim. No more. In my new community there are a few inflatable snowmen and Homers, but nothing like these houses with a hundred thousand lights.

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I guess you didn't stay with it to the point where they "slow things down." And go all multicultural, wishing happy Hanukkah and Kwanza and Happy Holidays... Oh god, the dry heaves... the dry heaves...

Oh. Geez. Now I gotta torture myself because I need to see just how unintentionally stupid and hopelessly tasteless these homeowners are. This could be quite a jolt because I'm listening to some Elvis Christmas tunes at the moment. Brace yourselves...

This is difficult. I so want to take a flamethrower to the snowman, Al Pacino-style. Just melt the bastard. And then I want to impale every single one of the elf-pigs on a candy cane.

By the way, they needn't have told me this is in California. It shows readily enough.

Okay, now they're singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." My only question is how much emphasis they'll put on the word "gay." Or if they'll say that word at all. Of course they will. This is California. Most people probably think it was written by and for gays. Could you blame them after looking at this presentation?

I feel like downing a shot of whiskey and shooting the cat after seeing that. I get the feeling that even the Who's in Whoville would run screaming from this schmaltzy presentation.

One obvious problem with this multiculturalist fest. Why is the snowman white? I don't see any "people of color" elf-pigs either. They're all quite pink.

By the way. Kwanza is a totally made-up holiday that has nothing at all to do with Africa. It's a white liberal holiday by and for nitwit, condescending rich white liberals.

Okay. I'd like to blow my brains out now.

Full implosion here!!!

Coming back to life with this.

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One obvious problem with this multiculturalist fest. Why is the snowman white? I don't see any "people of color" elf-pigs either. They're all quite pink.

Oh bouncing baby jesus, that's funny. We need to stage a protest.

Kwanzaa was hatched by a racist black kid in 1966, Ron Everett (later to be called Maulana Ron Karenga) at UCLA to "empower" black people and give them their own holiday as a foil to Christmas. Karenga is famous for saying that Jesus was psychotic, and that Christianity was a white religion that black people should shun.

After learning a few words of swahili, Karenga established the "seven principles of blackness", or nguzo saba

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• Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
  
• Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
  
• Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems, and to solve them together.
  
• Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
  
• Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
  
• Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
  
• Imani (Faith): To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with people sticking together to support each other. But in practice, this "sticking together" tends to be of the racist, paranoid, leftwing, anti-American Pastor Wright variety.

You could substitute german words, and that would be a neo-nazi national socialist list of principles.

OK, here's another Frenetic One. Apparently these Christmas House people all use the same mix CD.

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You could substitute german words, and that would be a neo-nazi national socialist list of principles.

LMAO. Zieg Kwanza. But you're right. That first one in particular is like porn for fascists. Community? Sure. Unity? Up to a point. But all those together like that? It spells Mussolini. Throw in the race thing and you get Hitler.

My older brother and oldest nephew (who just came in from out of town) are playing Baby Jesus in some drive-by thingie tonight. It's several "booths" which are recreations of various scenes from the Bible which people can either walk through or you can drive your car through. I love my brother, but I just can't do the drive-thru Baby Jesus thing.

Okay, that last one had some punch to it. Perhaps it's a fine line between Bowie and the Bohners, but I think this house was suitably superabundant. It said excess unashamedly. I mean, at least it had a theme and stuck to it. And there were no god damn animatronic pig-elfs.

But I do look at those houses and wonder what the people themselves think they are celebrating. That's not a knock. I just wonder.

Me too. Maybe it's some bower-bird thing that just keeps growing in excess when they see what's possible. It's kind of a display of WEALTH, don't you think? Harnessing the magic powers of light, to get people to go ooh and ahhh. It's like fireworks. Surprising and colorful displays which strike some chord in us that allows us to be FASCINATED.

Of course there's a line. Between good taste, good design, and visual superabundance. That was the original reason I brought up the Christmas House at MFI. To make the point that visual superabundance led to trainwrecks. Dead Squirrels... little single child-shoes by the gutter... shattered tail light glass. There's experience, and then there's DISTRACTION. There's art, harmony... or overload.

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Of course there's a line. Between good taste, good design, and visual superabundance. That was the original reason I brought up the Christmas House at MFI. To make the point that visual superabundance led to trainwrecks. Dead Squirrels... little single child-shoes by the gutter... shattered tail light glass. There's experience, and then there's DISTRACTION. There's art, harmony... or overload.

That calls for a Silly.


Silver Hell

Suicide walks, deadly sidewalks
Houses holiday-piled
In the street there's a feeling of nauseousness

Pig-elfs laughing
Fuse box snapping
Minilights mile after mile
And near ev'ry street gutter you'll see

Silver hell, silver hell
This kilowatt hour isn't pretty
Ding-a-lings, see them string
Soon it will be retina fade

Shattered tail lights
They didn't stop right
Blinded by bright red and green
As the gawkers rush by for cheap pleasure

Hear the squirrels crunch
As they gather lunch
Like a CSI crime scene
And above all the bloodshed you'll see

Silver hell, silver hell
This kilowatt hour isn't pretty
Ding-a-lings, see them string
Soon it will be retina fade

Oh Silly, where hast thou been? Bravo, Nelson. Bravo. Take note, Broeder Slackbor.

Thanks. And the proper version of this song to sing along with is Elvis' version. I downloaded an album of his outakes and various takes of various Christmas recordings. It's interesting that those still exist. In one he gives what, to my untrained ear, seems to be a stirring and flawless rendition of "Silver Bells." But then this voice from the booth pipes in at the end, "Okay. Nice. Let's try another." And then you hear in pure Elvis-ese "Oh, fuck." Very funny.

That first house is rather nice. Tastefully done.

Oh my god. Number two, though, is hilarious. I didn't think that kind of superabundance was electrically possible without your own portable nuclear power substation. But honestly, the effect isn't good. It's too much. Superabundance in regards to Christmas lighting can work. But that one is superduperabundance. It's a Spinal Tap 11.

Number 3. Again, the house itself is quite tasteful, although they couldn't resist super-sizing when it came to the grounds. If you have plastic figures on your lawn, you can definitely spell "kitsch."

Number 4 reminds me of a gingerbread house. Had they gone with this theme, they would have accomplished something great. As it is, it gains mostly from blind superabundance. And you might well go blind from the superabundance.

Number 5. Is that a picture of Chernobyl in the middle of melting down? That's awful.

Number 6. Not less-is-more, that's for sure. While not overtly distasteful, it's a reminder of how effective negative space can be, as well as less-is-more. Had they been a bit more selective and not covered the entire friggin' lawn with everything under the sun, it might have worked.

Number 7. Looks like an airliner crashed.

Number 8. Honestly. I would have great fun sitting on the curb with a beer and a pellet gun shooting the plastic figures. That's what that one wants to make me do. And how tacky to have the roof completely covered with lights like that.

Number 9. Okay, at least they have a recognizable theme. But it seems attached to just one side of the building as if it were a tumor. They needed to theme that around the building.

Number 10. Holy shit. No. That wasn't an exclamation, but an accurate description. Actually, they do pull off the "wonderland of color" which so many try for. Offsetting and anchoring the retina-burning explosion of color is the composition of the solids (such as they are) of the house and the tree. And then it just sort of spills out onto the curb as if waiting for the trashman to take it away in the morning. I doubt the homeowners did that. It just started reproducing on its own.

Number 11: Another example of a Number 3: The house is somewhat tasteful, but the homeowners couldn't resist the urge to add more and more and more and more. You can just hear the mad Dr. Frankensteinian laughter in the background: "It's alive!"

Number 12. There's no salvaging this one. And yet it looks honest for some reason.

Number 13: Bedlam. That's the name for this one. It looked like a truck came by and threw all that stuff in this guy's front yard.

Number 14: Ugly. Normally trimming the house with lights like that works. It didn't this time.

Number 15: Noel. If a pimp lives there then I say "Well done indeed."

Number 16: Another airliner crash. I hope no one was injured on the ground.

Number 17: Okay, I think this superabundance works. Note that you can actually see some pavement in front of the house. That's why I think this one works. There's someplace for the eye to rest. And, baby, your eye needs that when confronted with stuff like this.

Number 18: Probably not a 747 but a small Cessna.

Wow. What a collection of photos.

Yeah, that first house seems tame compared to some of the others. That big tree is a good use of color. It stands out as a singular element, dominant, and that's what makes it seem less like a friggin' tornado hit the place.

Hey, did you see that there are two auspicious astronomical events occurring within hours of each other... A full lunar eclipse, and then the winter solstice. I wonder what the ancients would have said about that coincidence? The solstice is at 6:38PM... at 7:06 we could say it's six-o'clock plus sixty six minutes, a good time for the antichrist to be born. Er, in a garish, overdone Christmas house, lol.

I am surprised these people have not been arrested by the carbon police let alone the taste police.

Where do you think you can buy bad test credits, Rico? Some of those guys obviously found them somewhere.