A Field Guide to Holiday Decorations

Originally published in The Town Journal, December 2005

If you’ve spent even half a holiday within ten miles of Mahwah, NJ you’ve probably heard of it. A house that brings holiday decorating to new heights, or extremes, depending on your point of view. I’d heard about it from neighbors, who commonly referred to it as “the Elvis house” (drive by with the windows open no matter how cold it is and you’ll hear one reason why). It’s part commercial shrine, part tourist attraction and completely saturated with light. We’ve taken guests to see it, telling them they won’t believe it, and it never disappoints.

Viewing, or really reviewing holiday decorations has become a bit of a family tradition for us. It goes back to when my wife and I were first married and were riding through the streets of Queens, NY marveling at the sheer volume of decorations people managed to jam on their postage stamp of a front lawn. It wasn’t mean-spirited since my parents had one of those lawns, too. Just not one buried in Christmas figures, lights and displays.

Over the years, we’ve not only continued those field trips in search of unusual holiday house decor, we’ve developed our own glossary of terms to describe the observations.

Those waist-high plastic lawn ornaments that grace lawns and porches? They’re plawnaments. The more popular plawnament subjects include Santa, snowmen and reindeer, but there’s a huge variety of others stationed out there. On smaller lawns, this abundance of options can lead to confusing yuletide displays. A set up featuring elves, angels, camels, choirboys, a menorah, Rudolph and toy soldiers all in uncomfortably close proximity to one another looks to me more like the set of a very strange movie.

This urge to jam-pack a space with too many figures is an all-too common occurrence that merits its own term, too. We call it HDD (not to be confused with HDTV), for “high density decorating.” Sometimes an entire street can be bitten by the decorating bug, with a “can you top this” approach to lighting. This is known as an illumineighborhood.

One of the more uncommon holiday spectacles, but one worth the hunt is the rooftop-mounted display. Invariably, this elevated creation features Santa, his sleigh and reindeer, often suspended on a wire or rope to appear airborne. It’s a sight that seems to defy gravity and, depending on its complexity, it can defy logic as well. We refer to this as a shingle Kringle.

The evolution of holiday decor has yielded a more recent phenomenon: the inflated holiday decoration. These inflated figures are not end-of-the-year accounting irregularities, but the large—some as high as seven feet tall—blow up decorations dotting front yards. In our vernacular: decorflations. This relatively new addition to the holiday decorating repertoire (and not just in December) shows growing popularity. Personally, I found the nylon inflated Thanksgiving turkeys with the 14-foot wingspan more intimidating than festive. With that little electric fan inside that drones on to keep them upright, the thing sounds haunted or sick, neither of which is the way I prefer my turkeys.

As for my house? White lights on garland and a wreath with a red bow seem to work just fine. I have gotten stung a few times by the myth that “even when one light goes out, the rest remain lit.” That’s the biggest holiday lie since coal in the stocking. There is always one bulb that goes out and knocks out at least part of the string. That’s called the domino bulb, of course. And the copywriter who writes that deceptive copy on the side of the box of lights? I’ve got a name or two for them, too. I can’t print it here, but I’ve mumbled it to myself on the ladder, several times.

Tom White is a business content writer for Fortune 500 companies, consultancies and nonprofits. President & Creative Director at The White Agency, Inc., he leverages his experience in business management, entrepreneurship and creative direction to assists clients in all aspects of creating a better message, from strategy to copy to speechwriting. "I say what you'd say, only better."