You'd Better Watch Out...

Our new next-door neighbour put up his Christmas lights yesterday.

A bald statement one the face of it, and one which fails to take into account the full ramifications of the event. For a start, it glides quietly over the fact that yesterday -- as those of you with access to a calendar will be able to confirm -- was the 6th of frigging November for Christ's sake, three clear weeks before the beginning of Advent and a whole seven weeks prior to Christmas itself. Presumably, in our new next-door neighbour's perceptions, the festive season begins just after Bonfire Night, and finishes -- when? Septuagesima? St Valentine's Day? August Bank Holiday?

Again, the sentence above doesn't commit itself concerning the scale of the operation. Our neighbour (a man whom we have incidentally never yet seen outside an Elvis T-shirt, but that's by the by) is apparently well-respected, in those circles which respect people for this kind of thing, for the lavishness of his seasonal light displays. His house has appeared on the local television news two years running. For all I know he's won awards.

The entire front of the house is smothered with flashing lights. A plastic Father Christmas and a snowman jostle on top of the porch. A sled with full reindeer team rushes from right to left above the ground-floor windows, and a whole row of hanged Santas depends from the gutter. A glance through the front window from the street reveals that the entire front room is decked out in the indoor equivalent of these displays.

I realise that I'm speaking as a man with a TARDIS-shaped bookshelf, but this does strike me as just the tiniest bit obsessive.

Our neighbour has even tried -- rather persistently, actually -- to involve us in his great work. Apparently our predecessors in the house were only too pleased to play host to his Jackson-Pollock-meets-Vong-Phaophanit installations. We, by contrast, expressed our gratitude at his willingness to consider our house a worthy canvas for his art, explained that we don't tend to consider reindeers and snowmen the aptest symbols of the Incarnation of Our Lord, and respectfully declined. Three fucking times.

It's going to be very difficult living with this for the next however-many months. Every evening when I come home from work, that string of butchered Santas will greet me like a hideous warning of the summary justice awaiting fat men who offer children sweets.

B. and I have a plan, though. Come Easter, we intend to erect in lights a twenty-foot crucifix, complete with an attractive crown of thorns and flashing droplets of blood; perhaps with an animated spear thrusting in and out of the occupant's side. It will be expensive to commission, but surely worth it.

It might even get us on the local news.