Light matters

On this Gratitude Monday before Christmas, I’m really grateful for the people who go a little cuckoo in the holiday lights/yard decoration department.

No, I’m not talking about the ones who spend tens of thousands of dollars to have professional light-decorators come in or any of that nonsense. I mean the folks who put up their grazing deer and inflated snowmen in their yards and run strings of lights along the eaves of their houses.

Well, okay—some of them are a little OTT, but I think those represent year-on-year accumulation of the Grinch, Mickey, Yoda and Muppets. And Christmas is definitely the season where you get a free pass from the aesthetics police.

Here are some of my favorites from this year from here in the Valley They Call Silicon.

You may recall my surprise at finding Target selling a Christmas Pig, wondering who might find them worthy of purchase. Well, I found out: someone in Palo Alto:

But if you look closely, you’ll discover that this pig has already been partying pretty hard; he’s lost one of his ears. Oh, dear.

Then there’s the ever popular Christmas pink flamingo:

Not far from me, there are several houses on a street that have their lights flashing in synch with a local FM radio station. I don’t know that I find all that flash all that attractive, but one yard had a tree that cycled through several color iterations, and I quite liked that:

Well, you get the drift.

On another of my walking routes, I got a kick out of this snowman listing a bit. Maybe he was at the same party as the Palo Alto pig.

Snowflakes are apparently trending this year. I found strings of them in both LED and regular lights

Well, you can see that there’s a lot to keep someone like me amused, and I’m grateful for that.

I’m also grateful that—so far—no one’s called the cops on me as I prowl their neighborhoods, taking photos like I’m casing the joint.