Just Thinkin' ...on Holiday Decorations

[Editor's Note: This column ran last year, but some of you may have missed it, and for those who did read it last year, I think you'll find it's worth a second reading... So, here it is again for your holiday amusement.]

I’m ashamed of it.

I wish I didn’t have to fess up.

But for the sake of 3,126 Dunstable residents (and the afore mentioned millions of other Dunstable News readers around the country and globe), I feel I must share my own personal frailties so that others may learn from my mistakes.

Yes.

I was once a Christmas decorating snob.

Heavy sigh.

I don’t know when it all started.  It think it was way back in my youth.  You see, my best friend was Michele (one “L”) Bernatich and she lived up the street from me.  At Christmas time, my family’s own decorations consisted of a manger, complete with the requisite peat moss (do you really think Jesus was born surrounded by peat?  I’m not so sure.) and a diminutive replica of the baby Jesus that, surprisingly, always ended up out of his crèche and hanging out with my Fischer Price Little People in their red school house with the fold down front wall that was also a chalkboard…go figure.

Anyway, we had our manger, a few cardboard images of Santa (one for the blue mirror in the living room, one for the front door), and a horrible 18” statue of Santa made from a doll’s head and some sort of scrunched red and white plastic stuff (made all the more terrifying by the fact that his head had been knocked off at some point (don’t blame me) and because of the chemical composition of the plastic stuff, no glue ever seemed to work, so his head continually tumbled onto the floor…I know, I know.  Years of suggested therapy were in my future even then.).  And of course, we had the Christmas tree, the tangled light fiasco every year, and the periodic trips to the hospital when my Mom (or I, in later years) inevitably cut a bit to zealously into the tree trunk, trying to make the tree fit into the stand, and caused ourselves enough of an injury to require stitches.

But Michele Bernatich’s house?

Well….HER house was just awesome.  It was the perfectly decorated Christmas house.  Have you ever seen National Lampoons Christmas Vacation?  Do you remember the part where Chevy Chase announces that he has decorated his house with 750,000 twinkle lights?

That’s nothin’.

Michele Bernatich’s house had way more than that.  And the lights were all white, too.  Michele’s mom, Rochele (also one ‘L’), explained to me that white lights were a lot more classy than colored lights and that’s why she used them.  Those lights were everywhere.  They were all around the windows and up the big Greek-revival columns.  They had twinkle lights on their front bushes, twinkle lights up their lamp posts, candle lights in every single window (even the back ones!) and you could EVEN see their Christmas tree (yep, twinkle lights) right in the middle of the their twinkle light-bedecked bay window.

Ah, to my eight-year-old mind, they had the life (and it did not contain a weird, beheaded plastic encrusted Santa,).

So, as we all do, I grew up from there.  One day I had my own home (a townhouse in Nashua that we bought in 1988, about three minutes before the housing bubble burst, but let’s not get into THAT right now.) and, inevitably my own first holiday season in which to decorate.  And you know what we decorated with.  Yep.  A nice, classy assortment of white twinkle lights, a few splashes of greenery with red bows (and white lights), and our Christmas tree (with, again, white lights), and no statues of Santa at all (well, we had no kids yet and I still hadn’t dealt head-on with the whole Santa-induced childhood trauma). 

And now here comes the snob part.

Okay, so we’d decorated our unexpectedly de-valued condo.  And over the next few weeks, we set out on a series of planned and unplanned jaunts (well, car-based jaunts) through the neighborhoods of Nashua, Hollis, Tyngsboro, and Dunstable (this was about how far the universe extended for us then) to look at, yes, OTHER PEOPLE’S holiday decorations.  And, yes, as expected, OTHER PEOPLE used (gasp!)…

Colored lights!

And not only that!  Sometimes they put large, plastic snowmen on their lawns!  Or candy canes!  Or – more horrifying than anything else – SANTAS!  I once even saw an entire lawn decorated with plastic, pink flamingos all in Santa hats!  Oh the horror!  The humanity!

All of those poor, misguided holiday decorators.  What could they do about it though?  Without the advice of Mrs. Bernatich, they were doomed to have ‘unclassy’ holiday decorations.  I guessed that we all couldn’t be so lucky as to have the friendship of Michele Bernatich and the motherly guidance of Rochele Bernatich to help us into our own holiday decorating years.  Obviously, everyone else had been gypped.  Poor them.

So now fast forward into my thirtys.  I not only had a husband (the same one), but three wonderful children.  I was still holding to the whole white twinkle light theory, and had finally dealt with the childhood plastic Santa issue.  I was still making traditional evening pilgrimages, with my kids this time, though the local towns (I lived in Dunstable by then) and I was still not very impressed with colored lights and plastic replicas of winter characters (and you wouldn’t want to even get me STARTED on the ‘sparkle deer’ – especially the ones that move!), when one night, we passed a house on Thorndike Street (I lived on Kemp Street then, so hadn’t seen this one before). 

It was an old white house, with a horse barn out back.  This house had more plastic and blow-up Christmas characters than I’d ever seen at one house.  The house was covered in colored lights – not all perfectly strung – just hanging here and there.  It was obvious that the wind had knocked some light strands out of place, and an eight-foot inflatable Frosty-the-Snowman was teetering dangerously to one side (but his head was still attached to his body, so it wasn’t too scary).  To my way of thinking, this was a decorating disaster.  There were no white twinkle lights, far too many colors, and I was not fooled for a moment into thinking any of these characters was even CLOSE to real.  And then my husband said something awesome.  Something that changed my whole outlook on holiday decorations.  He said:

“Boy, they must really love Christmas time.”

It hit me like a ton of Santa heads.

And I was very quiet (unusual, yes, but not unprecedented).  Those people DID really love Christmas.  They must have!  They obviously worked really hard on putting all those characters and decorations up.  It must have taken them days to get their lights up.  My guess was that they did that every year.

And they weren’t selfish about it either.  They had a house that sat right on the road.  That meant they were sharing the products of their work with every single person who passed by.

I bought my first set of colored lights that year.

And my kids decorated the bushes in front of our house with them.  And they did a terrible job.

It was all wrong.

And it was totally right.

And from that day on, I’ve had such an overwhelming appreciation for everyone who decorates their home at this time of year – whether with a few candle lights in the windows, or an all out color and plastic-infused extravaganza.  I still like the white twinkle lights too.  Everything goes.

So in that spirit, let me tell you about a few places you might want to pass by in town, if you get the chance. 

The Kimpton’s home on Main Street just out of the center of town on the left is a study in old-fashioned holiday spirit. White lights in the windows and a spot lit wreath on their historic barn.  Great.

Further on up Main St (toward Nashua), the Sweets have decorated their property (on the left) fabulously.  It is bedecked in white lights and with all the buildings glittering, it looks like a holiday village across the water.  Beautiful.

If you keep heading up Main toward Nashua and take a look to your left across the back of the Simmons’ property, you’ll see a house set back (you can see it from both Depot and Main) and it is lit and has wonderful characters on the front lawn – the kids will love that one. 

The kids will also love a house on Cross Street (closer to the Pleasant Street side) where it looks like the owners are hosting a festive holiday party, complete with oversized blow-up characters – including a polar bear! 

Over on Groton Street, heading toward Groton and the high school, but still in Dunstable, is one of my favorite displays.  Just as you pass Kemp Street, you pass a series of houses where the folks take their decorating very seriously.  Every year they send kids into frenzies with the lights and displays.  I don’t know if they coordinate it all or not, but it looks like it, and it looks great!

I’m sure there are other amazing displays in town and you should write in comments if you’ve seen good ones because then we all appreciate them through the holidays.  Its kind of neat to acknowledge folks for handing out smiles to folks they haven’t even met, too.  How holiday-spiritish!  All that giving with no receiving.  Kudos.

I’d like to send out a personal thanks to all who have decorated.  I notice it, I smile because you’ve done it (and it lifts my spirits ever time I pass), and I appreciate all of it – white lights, colored lights, and…yes…even plastic Santas (with heads of course).

Ho. Ho.

Lisa