post-Christmas reflections

I love Christmas decorations... I used to spend hours driving around various nearby towns looking at decorated houses and picking annual favorites. And then I'd always be just a little bit depressed at the beginning of January (ie right now!) when, the holidays having passed, ornaments get packed back up and put back in the basement, candles disappear from the windows, Christmas trees are thrown away and forgotten, their needles vacuumed up... and the streets would be plunged once again into darkness.
Back to decorations. Now, there are various directions in which you can go in relation to your exterior Christmas decorations. After some serious thought resulting from too much idle time (always dangerous), I think the most logical way to classify the various decorating styles is clearly using a system of sexual preferences. I pretty much have the same system with ice cream sprinkles as well, but that's another story. As I see things, holiday decore basically comes down to the following:
1) Businessman straight: like its human counterpart, this very hetero way of decorating the home has no thrills. On the straight businessman, you generally find a simple tie to go with a nice clean suit and some squeaky clean polished shoes. On the straight businessman house, its simple white lights (perhaps around a lightpost in the front yard) and white candles in the windows. All very clean. Very to the book. Inside you will probably find two perfect children (praying by their bedsides and then peaking out of their doors to see if Santa Claus has come yet), a dutiful wife (in an apron baking perfectly round cookies from scratch), and of course... the straight businessman (I don't exactly have an image of what he'd be doing-- but it'd probably involve a recliner after a long day at work). Inside, there is a Better Homes-esque Christmas tree with perfectly spaced candy canes, an arrangement of ornaments, and yes, more white lights. The hetero Christmas soundtrack: strictly symphonies' renditions of traditional songs (Boston Pops, for example) and religious hymns (O come all ye faithful, O little town of Bethlehem, etc)
2) In the closet: Homes of this decorating style tend to follow the rules of the businessman straight trend... at first glance anyway. On the human you have a nice suit and a style resembling that of the straight-arrow businessman. But then you notice perhaps a bright orange and green printed tie or some fancy-shmancy Italian shoes made from crocodile or ferret or some other random wildlife creature that spices up that classic (or boring, depending on your style) businessman look. The same goes with the in the closet home. You have the white light candles in the windows, a nice wreath on the front door, everything looks pretty basic and by the book. But then you see some random accessory thrown in... perhaps one of those huge blow-up Santa Clauses/snowmen/reindeer plopped in the front yard and a 14 feet tall Christmas tree in the living room window with brightly-colored, rapidly blinking lights. So everything looks basic and Leave it to Beaver-ish at first.... but then you notice a few key elements that keep you guessing and wondering if just maybe there's more to the story. Soundtrack: an eclectic mix of traditional caroles with some random new, hip Christmas songs thrown in. Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer and I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus are a few of my my favorites. Just a little edgy for Christmas but still maintaining overall wholesome, G-rated values.
3) Very much out of the closet: I think you know where we're heading here. Homes of this trend are my favorite- definitely the most fun to seek out. They are also the most expensive to maintain due to an intense focus on outward appearance... for this reason you can usually spot these houses from 2 miles away. On the human, economic ruin is caused by costly designer clothing... on the home, it's costly electricity bills... see how these connections are so rational? People who decorate their homes in this way just go all out: white lights are completely banished and replaced with all sorts of brightly-colored bulbs the size of your fist which sporadically blink in no set pattern. You've got blow up Santa's in the front yard, fake Santa with reindeer nailed to the roof, lights on every tree on the property... basically, it looks like the home-owners just go to Walmart and buy up every possible Christmas decoration/fad and make their home look purposely tacky. And I love it. Soundtrack: there is no set soundtrack for these crazy Christmas-aholics. I'd say songs that fit in between the categories of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer and Santa Claus Was a Black Man (yes, it exists... I actually have it downloaded). Below you will find a street in my town on which all of the homes on the entire street dedicate their homes, during the month of December, to this out of the closet trend. It's like Disneyworld on Christmas crack. And every year I go look at the houses.