It's Christmas Time In Paradise
I hope she doesn't break down.
Twenty six thousand skeletal animatronic reindeer, their ethereal skeletons illuminated by hundreds of tiny white lights, dipped their lifeless heads endlessly into the chemically-fertilized blades of six thousand lawns.
It is time for a Christmas light tour, and so I am picked up by T.'s family in a red, mid-90s Ford Aerostar. We are to have dinner at The Pagoda, a Mexican restaurant. Driving past, we find it closed (at 6:30pm on a Sunday), and we wind up at Casa De Paradiso, perhaps the lousiest of the four or five vaguely lousy Mexican restaurants in town.
This being Sunday night, it is packed. There must be sixty cars in the parking lot. There is a forty-five minute wait for a table at a Mexican joint that offers French fries with its entrees. We decide to go up the hill about fifteen miles. On the way, T. decides she is too cold and asks her little brother, sitting in the seat behind us, to pull out the blanket.
"I can't," he whines. "It's under the shotgun, and that's facing straight up." There's a moment of silence in the car. I look at T.. She shrugs. Her brother somehow manages to retrieve the blanket without disturbing the firearm, and she wraps herself up like a Russian grandmother.
We arrive at the restaurant and in the parking lot I ask her, "Uh, why the shotgun?"
"It was in the truck," she replies, gesturing towards her father. "And he didn't want to just leave it there." I nod vacantly. T.'s father is a bit eccentric, and this is not unprecedented. Today he took her little brother with him to the mountains, where he loaded the truck full of snow and brought it home ("So we can make a snowman. And shoot him with the paintball guns.").
The restaurant, we see, usually closes at 8:30pm, but this being December 23, they close tonight at 7pm. It is now 6:50pm. We make it in justunder the gun in time. The place tries hard to be a cozy slice of Americana--privately owned, not a franchise, but not quite a genuine institution, either.
The cook's credentials are framed on the wall--a proud graduate of the culinary Butte County Regional Occupation Program. I am relieved, but not exactly comforted by the uppermost plaque, which pronounces his proficiency in sanitation.
After we are seated, T.'s father observes that our waitress is the one featured in the restaurant's local cable TV advertisement. Grabbing his napkin, he shrieks, "Ohmigod. Where's a pen?" Pausing to further cultivate the joke, he pulls up his sweatshirt and undershirt to reveal a pasty flank.
"Oooh! Oooh!" he emotes. "Autograph my nipple." We groan, and thankfully, he quickly re-clothes himself. This has transpired while our waitress is on the other side of the room, out of earshot. Unfortunately, when she returns to take the order for T.'s now sullen and indecisive little brother, her father again lifts his shirt and aims a nipple at her. Fortunately, she seems not to notice.
When we leave, T'.s mother leaves a little extra for the tip, muttering something about the holiday spirit, but probably attempting to settle some familial karmic debt to the unsuspecting waitress.
Back down the hill we go. T. asks, "What happened to the Christmas music?" "We left it at home. Your mother forgot to take it along," replies her father. All the way up the hill we have been listening to Cat Stevens. The closest we got to Christmas music was a Kinky Friedman song called "They Don't Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore." Now it turns to mid-70s bloat rock and torch-soul.
We cruise down Pentz Road with the lights off, gazing at the displays.
Everybody in town has purchased white icicle string lights, and every house we pass is adorned in almost exactly the same way--with these lights strung along the eaves of the roof and garage. All the way down the hill T.'s father has been giggling about the curious behavior of some friends of his.
"They live in what amounts to a shack," he explains. "But they put up so many lights that the whole place threatens to collapse. And it's not just outside--they put up so much inside that you can hardly move. I don't know where they sleep. It's Jenny who's really into this. Tom just goes along with it. He hasn't got a choice." I'm skeptical, but I am soon to be set straight.
When we pull onto the driveway, we see that we are not alone. There must be about twenty cars, moving slowly up and down the muddy driveway, parked in the yard, and parked in neighbors' yards. We park across the street from the display.
"My uncle lives right there," explains T.'s father, pointing to the house directly across the street. "He hates people," he chuckles. The house has absolutely no lights and the shades are drawn. We get out of the van and gaze at the spectacle.
As a rough tally, there are three or four different electric nativity scenes, five to ten electric Santas (one of which has an indistinct face and resembles nothing so much as a hollow, Yuletide arachnid), one illuminated hearth (complete with false fire), one oversized electric guitar (from last year's "rock & roll X-mas" theme), twelve to twenty oversized glass ornaments hanging from a small, deciduous tree, at least sixteen reindeer (not including the aforementioned animatronic skeletons), and one sign, featuring a doe-eyed teddy bear in an elf costume, reading, "No Parking: Gift Delivery Zone," in front of which is parked a '94 Toyota Tercel.
Of course there are thousands upon thousands of colored lights, strung all over the roof and the nearby trees. The yard itself is a viscous morass of fresh mud. Today is the first day of clear skies in a week. To our left, an old woman whose left knee bends the wrong way teeters dangerously on the slight incline, her crinkled face set in a grimace of pain or determination, or both. Her adult daughter comes up to help her along. I watch the strange kinks through her turquoise polyester pants leg, mesmerized by the movement.
Momentarily dumbstruck by the thought of December's electricity bill, I am suddenly beckoned onward. They offer tours of the inside, as well as the outside, and our turn has just come up. T.'s father has exchanged friendly greetings with Tom, who keeps an eye on visitors and the displays, and he urges us to come have a look at the interior. Tom is a lanky, mild looking fellow with soft eyes, a long nose, and a large, graying mustache. He leads us up to the door.
The house is hardly larger than two metal storage sheds. Its gray paint is beginning to peel off. The door opens to reveal a warm, oppressively bright space. Tom's wife, Jenny, is a stocky, dwarfish woman with bulging eyes and thinning reddish hair. She speaks with smoke-cured vocal cords, welcoming us, examining T. and her little brother, and insisting that we look in every room, beginning with the bathroom.
The bathroom is adorned with red and green curtains, a Santa Claus toilet seat cover, several miniature houses on the counter, a Christmas wreath on the wall, and two light bulbs decorated with painted candy canes. My jaw hangs open, but we are only beginning. It is now that I become aware of a certain pervasive humming. It is the combined drone of several hundred miniature electric motors.
Jenny offers us cookies and brownies, and proudly directs our attention to the rafters (about two feet above our heads), which have been lined with tinsel and lights (and fiber-optic "snowflakes"), and to the faux-fir garland which lines the kitchen, on which hangs roughly fifty ornaments. These ornaments all feature some sort of miniature, whether it be an elf workshop or a tiny tricycle, and about forty-five of them are moving. She prods Tom.
"Go over there and turn that one on," she says eagerly. Tom wordlessly complies, and as he reaches for the switch on the back of the perverted bulb, she is in agony. "Don't break it! Don't pull on it now, you'll break it!" she directs anxiously.
The heat is oppressive. Seven people stand in a kitchen not much larger than a grade school foursquare court. Fortunately, Tom has enough sense not to manhandle these intricate works of kitsch, and successfully switches it on. A tiny plastic elf bangs a tiny plastic mallet against some sort of giant toy. Jenny beams.
"See, we have all sorts," she says. "Little workers, little trains, little ice-skaters." The list goes on and the minuscule figures whip endlessly around inside transparent plastic hemispheres. We walk through the kitchen and into the sunken living room.
I pause at the door to the bedroom. Inside I can see two toddler-sized figures. They are motorized display dolls, dressed like Victorian-era youths, resplendent in fur coats and muffs and dapper caps. Their arms move slowly and their eyes don't blink.
Everywhere the walls are decorated with fake wreaths and commemorative Christmas plates, featuring various cute scenes, firmly secured with wire. There must be fifty of them. In the sunken living room, no larger than the kitchen and occupied by one artificial tree and one real tree, another man, in his late fifties and balding sits on the couch. He is a family friend and he sits, scratching the ears of a bedraggled-looking mop dog.
The fake tree has a string of lights twisted around its fake trunk. It is decorated with more than two hundred ornaments. It glistens. The angel at its top touches the rafters. To give an idea of scale, the tree is no more than seven feet tall.
"Wow," says T.'s father. "I'm surprised you go to all this trouble. This must really be a disruption to your life." Jenny's smile wavers. She is caught between a rock and a hard place. There is a beat before she answers with a fragile edge.
"Well, you know. It's what we do." This is sure awkward. I hope she doesn't break down.
"How long did it take you to decorate that tree?" asks T.'s father, and fragile time is thankfully over.
"Well, this year, because I had some other problems and had to rush it, it took me five or six days," replies Jenny. "Usually it takes me a week to ten days to get it all on. This time I just kind of threw it all up."
We gawk again at the tree, whose ornament boxes apparently occupy a sizable portion of the house for the other eleven months. Beneath the tree is a three-foot long sleigh set. A reindeer slowly swivels its electric head back and forth. Two more Victorian zombie dolls inhabit the remaining corners. Several different electronic Christmas carols create a discord. Jenny continues her tour.
"Now, up here is the little elf village, and down there is the fiber optic poinsettia." It's a God damned fake plant sprouting tiny translucent tubes and pinpricks of light in red, green and blue. I had no idea that ornament technology had made such tremendous technological leaps. The village, atop her TV cabinet, consists of roughly twenty-five tiny ceramic structures, obviously a collectible set, brought together for heartwarming effect. An entire elfin economy is represented.
The family friend smiles a warm and slightly creepy smile at T., and makes a paltry effort at small talk - dog ownership, I believe.
Jenny complains about how there was no Christmas light contest this year (the Town Council failed to organize it amid complaints that the same people, i.e., Jenny, won every year). "But you see, that hundred dollar gift certificate at K-Mart bought those reindeer out there, and this little elf cobbler shop over here." The rich get richer.
"Wow, with all of this stuff," says T.'s father in his typically graceless manner, "pretty soon you're going to need another husband to help put it up!" Tom is in the kitchen and pretends not to hear, making a vague comment about feeding the dogs. Jenny cackles and makes some sort of slurred remark to either T.'s father or the family friend.
"The dogs like to bite Tom to let him know they're hungry," she adds with a laugh. The bedraggled mop dog gets up off the couch at the sound of a human at the sink, but is waylaid on its journey to the kitchen by the strange and wonderful smell of T.'s father's shoes. As it sniffs, Jenny provides a play by play in the first person.
"I got to use my nose since my eyes are goin' now. Yep, I got to get a good smell of this," Jenny says, personifying the dog with a raspy, childlike voice. We are paralyzed by her bathos.
Jenny is going into great detail on the hand-carved miniature carousel her father made when he was 72 when our visit is cut short by a phone call. Tom comes in and says, "Hon, I've got to go out there. Scott [T.'s father's uncle] just called and says that somebody in a red van has parked in the middle of his flower bed. I better go out and see if I can move him."
T.'s father begins to chuckle. We quickly take our leave and shuffle across the yard. In the warm glow of umpteen thousand Christmas lights, the black mud shows red highlights. Across the street an old woman stands next to the Aerostar. T.'s father has parked in his own uncle's flowerbed.
This is only the beginning of the evening's tour. Before the evening's close, we will see thirteen thousand more reindeer, and five more American-flag light arrangements. Unfortunately, after this house, every reindeer-strewn front yard in this community's more affluent enclaves of conformity and jealousy will seem like an exercise in restraint.
It is time for a Christmas light tour, and so I am picked up by T.'s family in a red, mid-90s Ford Aerostar. We are to have dinner at The Pagoda, a Mexican restaurant. Driving past, we find it closed (at 6:30pm on a Sunday), and we wind up at Casa De Paradiso, perhaps the lousiest of the four or five vaguely lousy Mexican restaurants in town.
This being Sunday night, it is packed. There must be sixty cars in the parking lot. There is a forty-five minute wait for a table at a Mexican joint that offers French fries with its entrees. We decide to go up the hill about fifteen miles. On the way, T. decides she is too cold and asks her little brother, sitting in the seat behind us, to pull out the blanket.
"I can't," he whines. "It's under the shotgun, and that's facing straight up." There's a moment of silence in the car. I look at T.. She shrugs. Her brother somehow manages to retrieve the blanket without disturbing the firearm, and she wraps herself up like a Russian grandmother.
We arrive at the restaurant and in the parking lot I ask her, "Uh, why the shotgun?"
"It was in the truck," she replies, gesturing towards her father. "And he didn't want to just leave it there." I nod vacantly. T.'s father is a bit eccentric, and this is not unprecedented. Today he took her little brother with him to the mountains, where he loaded the truck full of snow and brought it home ("So we can make a snowman. And shoot him with the paintball guns.").
The restaurant, we see, usually closes at 8:30pm, but this being December 23, they close tonight at 7pm. It is now 6:50pm. We make it in just
The cook's credentials are framed on the wall--a proud graduate of the culinary Butte County Regional Occupation Program. I am relieved, but not exactly comforted by the uppermost plaque, which pronounces his proficiency in sanitation.
After we are seated, T.'s father observes that our waitress is the one featured in the restaurant's local cable TV advertisement. Grabbing his napkin, he shrieks, "Ohmigod. Where's a pen?" Pausing to further cultivate the joke, he pulls up his sweatshirt and undershirt to reveal a pasty flank.
"Oooh! Oooh!" he emotes. "Autograph my nipple." We groan, and thankfully, he quickly re-clothes himself. This has transpired while our waitress is on the other side of the room, out of earshot. Unfortunately, when she returns to take the order for T.'s now sullen and indecisive little brother, her father again lifts his shirt and aims a nipple at her. Fortunately, she seems not to notice.
When we leave, T'.s mother leaves a little extra for the tip, muttering something about the holiday spirit, but probably attempting to settle some familial karmic debt to the unsuspecting waitress.
Back down the hill we go. T. asks, "What happened to the Christmas music?" "We left it at home. Your mother forgot to take it along," replies her father. All the way up the hill we have been listening to Cat Stevens. The closest we got to Christmas music was a Kinky Friedman song called "They Don't Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore." Now it turns to mid-70s bloat rock and torch-soul.
We cruise down Pentz Road with the lights off, gazing at the displays.
Everybody in town has purchased white icicle string lights, and every house we pass is adorned in almost exactly the same way--with these lights strung along the eaves of the roof and garage. All the way down the hill T.'s father has been giggling about the curious behavior of some friends of his.
"They live in what amounts to a shack," he explains. "But they put up so many lights that the whole place threatens to collapse. And it's not just outside--they put up so much inside that you can hardly move. I don't know where they sleep. It's Jenny who's really into this. Tom just goes along with it. He hasn't got a choice." I'm skeptical, but I am soon to be set straight.
When we pull onto the driveway, we see that we are not alone. There must be about twenty cars, moving slowly up and down the muddy driveway, parked in the yard, and parked in neighbors' yards. We park across the street from the display.
"My uncle lives right there," explains T.'s father, pointing to the house directly across the street. "He hates people," he chuckles. The house has absolutely no lights and the shades are drawn. We get out of the van and gaze at the spectacle.
As a rough tally, there are three or four different electric nativity scenes, five to ten electric Santas (one of which has an indistinct face and resembles nothing so much as a hollow, Yuletide arachnid), one illuminated hearth (complete with false fire), one oversized electric guitar (from last year's "rock & roll X-mas" theme), twelve to twenty oversized glass ornaments hanging from a small, deciduous tree, at least sixteen reindeer (not including the aforementioned animatronic skeletons), and one sign, featuring a doe-eyed teddy bear in an elf costume, reading, "No Parking: Gift Delivery Zone," in front of which is parked a '94 Toyota Tercel.
Of course there are thousands upon thousands of colored lights, strung all over the roof and the nearby trees. The yard itself is a viscous morass of fresh mud. Today is the first day of clear skies in a week. To our left, an old woman whose left knee bends the wrong way teeters dangerously on the slight incline, her crinkled face set in a grimace of pain or determination, or both. Her adult daughter comes up to help her along. I watch the strange kinks through her turquoise polyester pants leg, mesmerized by the movement.
Momentarily dumbstruck by the thought of December's electricity bill, I am suddenly beckoned onward. They offer tours of the inside, as well as the outside, and our turn has just come up. T.'s father has exchanged friendly greetings with Tom, who keeps an eye on visitors and the displays, and he urges us to come have a look at the interior. Tom is a lanky, mild looking fellow with soft eyes, a long nose, and a large, graying mustache. He leads us up to the door.
The house is hardly larger than two metal storage sheds. Its gray paint is beginning to peel off. The door opens to reveal a warm, oppressively bright space. Tom's wife, Jenny, is a stocky, dwarfish woman with bulging eyes and thinning reddish hair. She speaks with smoke-cured vocal cords, welcoming us, examining T. and her little brother, and insisting that we look in every room, beginning with the bathroom.
The bathroom is adorned with red and green curtains, a Santa Claus toilet seat cover, several miniature houses on the counter, a Christmas wreath on the wall, and two light bulbs decorated with painted candy canes. My jaw hangs open, but we are only beginning. It is now that I become aware of a certain pervasive humming. It is the combined drone of several hundred miniature electric motors.
Jenny offers us cookies and brownies, and proudly directs our attention to the rafters (about two feet above our heads), which have been lined with tinsel and lights (and fiber-optic "snowflakes"), and to the faux-fir garland which lines the kitchen, on which hangs roughly fifty ornaments. These ornaments all feature some sort of miniature, whether it be an elf workshop or a tiny tricycle, and about forty-five of them are moving. She prods Tom.
"Go over there and turn that one on," she says eagerly. Tom wordlessly complies, and as he reaches for the switch on the back of the perverted bulb, she is in agony. "Don't break it! Don't pull on it now, you'll break it!" she directs anxiously.
The heat is oppressive. Seven people stand in a kitchen not much larger than a grade school foursquare court. Fortunately, Tom has enough sense not to manhandle these intricate works of kitsch, and successfully switches it on. A tiny plastic elf bangs a tiny plastic mallet against some sort of giant toy. Jenny beams.
"See, we have all sorts," she says. "Little workers, little trains, little ice-skaters." The list goes on and the minuscule figures whip endlessly around inside transparent plastic hemispheres. We walk through the kitchen and into the sunken living room.
I pause at the door to the bedroom. Inside I can see two toddler-sized figures. They are motorized display dolls, dressed like Victorian-era youths, resplendent in fur coats and muffs and dapper caps. Their arms move slowly and their eyes don't blink.
Everywhere the walls are decorated with fake wreaths and commemorative Christmas plates, featuring various cute scenes, firmly secured with wire. There must be fifty of them. In the sunken living room, no larger than the kitchen and occupied by one artificial tree and one real tree, another man, in his late fifties and balding sits on the couch. He is a family friend and he sits, scratching the ears of a bedraggled-looking mop dog.
The fake tree has a string of lights twisted around its fake trunk. It is decorated with more than two hundred ornaments. It glistens. The angel at its top touches the rafters. To give an idea of scale, the tree is no more than seven feet tall.
"Wow," says T.'s father. "I'm surprised you go to all this trouble. This must really be a disruption to your life." Jenny's smile wavers. She is caught between a rock and a hard place. There is a beat before she answers with a fragile edge.
"Well, you know. It's what we do." This is sure awkward. I hope she doesn't break down.
"How long did it take you to decorate that tree?" asks T.'s father, and fragile time is thankfully over.
"Well, this year, because I had some other problems and had to rush it, it took me five or six days," replies Jenny. "Usually it takes me a week to ten days to get it all on. This time I just kind of threw it all up."
We gawk again at the tree, whose ornament boxes apparently occupy a sizable portion of the house for the other eleven months. Beneath the tree is a three-foot long sleigh set. A reindeer slowly swivels its electric head back and forth. Two more Victorian zombie dolls inhabit the remaining corners. Several different electronic Christmas carols create a discord. Jenny continues her tour.
"Now, up here is the little elf village, and down there is the fiber optic poinsettia." It's a God damned fake plant sprouting tiny translucent tubes and pinpricks of light in red, green and blue. I had no idea that ornament technology had made such tremendous technological leaps. The village, atop her TV cabinet, consists of roughly twenty-five tiny ceramic structures, obviously a collectible set, brought together for heartwarming effect. An entire elfin economy is represented.
The family friend smiles a warm and slightly creepy smile at T., and makes a paltry effort at small talk - dog ownership, I believe.
Jenny complains about how there was no Christmas light contest this year (the Town Council failed to organize it amid complaints that the same people, i.e., Jenny, won every year). "But you see, that hundred dollar gift certificate at K-Mart bought those reindeer out there, and this little elf cobbler shop over here." The rich get richer.
"Wow, with all of this stuff," says T.'s father in his typically graceless manner, "pretty soon you're going to need another husband to help put it up!" Tom is in the kitchen and pretends not to hear, making a vague comment about feeding the dogs. Jenny cackles and makes some sort of slurred remark to either T.'s father or the family friend.
"The dogs like to bite Tom to let him know they're hungry," she adds with a laugh. The bedraggled mop dog gets up off the couch at the sound of a human at the sink, but is waylaid on its journey to the kitchen by the strange and wonderful smell of T.'s father's shoes. As it sniffs, Jenny provides a play by play in the first person.
"I got to use my nose since my eyes are goin' now. Yep, I got to get a good smell of this," Jenny says, personifying the dog with a raspy, childlike voice. We are paralyzed by her bathos.
Jenny is going into great detail on the hand-carved miniature carousel her father made when he was 72 when our visit is cut short by a phone call. Tom comes in and says, "Hon, I've got to go out there. Scott [T.'s father's uncle] just called and says that somebody in a red van has parked in the middle of his flower bed. I better go out and see if I can move him."
T.'s father begins to chuckle. We quickly take our leave and shuffle across the yard. In the warm glow of umpteen thousand Christmas lights, the black mud shows red highlights. Across the street an old woman stands next to the Aerostar. T.'s father has parked in his own uncle's flowerbed.
This is only the beginning of the evening's tour. Before the evening's close, we will see thirteen thousand more reindeer, and five more American-flag light arrangements. Unfortunately, after this house, every reindeer-strewn front yard in this community's more affluent enclaves of conformity and jealousy will seem like an exercise in restraint.