spirit of christmas 2006

The expense of decorating is hitting yards around the country. Each year Tony Blore, a homeowner in Bellingham, Wash., adds another large figure to his home's holiday light show. The show already involves 35,000 lights and garners letters of appreciation from neighborhood families. This year, he eyed an animated Santa climbing a ladder and a nearly four-foot diameter blinking ball by LightTheNight.com. But he opted for only the Santa, which cost around $430.

"The prices are just getting quite expensive," he says. "Maybe next year I'll be able to buy more."

...

But despite any cost increases, many customers still want a professional to dress up their home. Peter Latsey, a real-estate investor outside Boston, spent around $2,000 to have the Christmas Light People put lights on some trees and the roofline of his 5,000 square-foot contemporary colonial home. He didn't mind that the rising cost of lights contributed at least an additional $100 to the job. WSJ

----

Last year a guy down the street had one gigantic Frosty ballooning on his roof. This year, he's got six or seven figures of the season, and a rectangular frame of lights around them, making for a much bigger, more Vegasy or Rockettes kind of look. It's a bold manifesto with more than a dollop of panache. I've not had a chance to chat with him, but, [psst] he's not alone.

Cheap tattered speculation: Capitalism is anxiety by another name. There is a suburban semaphorics that operates without code book or invigorating self-improvement seminar. It's like, just as the male of the USian species will vent his frustration about this world going to hell in a handbasket by whipping out the leafblower and blasting for hours and hours until nary a dendric fragment may be surveilled hither or yon, just so will he spend large dollars and time erecting his very own personal remix of Salvation into the sky, a vision for all his neighbors and any potential flying-over terrorists to read. Merchants are pleased.