mike | 8 Dec 2011 | 508 Views | 2 Likes | 0 Dislikes

I Love YouTube: Christmas Lights!

When I was a kid growing up in frozen Edmonton, AB, we'd every year around Christmas time pile into the van for a frozen cruise down "Candy Cane Lane", a three or four-block stretch of bungalows decked out with all kinds of crazy Christmas decorations.

It was traffic pandemonium, until they got traffic cops involved - not an easy duty when it's -32C - and as kids we circulated all kinds of rumours about the street (which in the non-Xmas season reverted to 104th street iirc). "You have to meet with the Christmas Council to be allowed to buy a house there" was a popular one. In retrospect that seems ridiculous - where would the Christmas Council even convene a meeting - but also somewhat plausible. Neighborhood participation was pretty near total, and people went balls-out. The apotheosis was the year a guy parked a real '67 Cadillac convertible - red, natch - on his lawn, tethered it to some robotic reindeer and stuck a waving, grinning Santa in the back. That was cool, and I knew then that there would be no topping that display of vulgar and awesome Christmas spirit.

I was dumb as hell.

At some point, somebody invented some kind of box that could coordinate Christmas lights with music, and in a stroke of genius, started marketing it to suburban dads. The result:

What better embodiment of the spirit of Christmas than a throbbing sore tooth of a house that blitzes the neighborhood with megavolts of seizure-light to the tune of "Reign In Blood" by Slayer? That question is sarcastic, and dismissive, but the answer might be the following:

Nope. That's way, way worse. Could you imagine hearing that horrible, horrible Coca Cola song all night long pounding its breathy exhortations through your drawn blinds and garbage-bagged windows? I always thought the best part of Christmas was being hounded by Rock-A-Pella from Carmen Sandiego telling me to buy shit non stop while the police shone marine tugboat spotlights in my face at night, while I'm in bed.

Thankfully - and this is another example of how YouTube can be used as a meta-tool to learn Cool Culture Facts - the number of "Crazy Christmas Music House" videos on YT took a steep flip into the ditch around 2008, and the market hasn't rebounded. Maybe people are reticent in these times of austerity in Europe to literally burn money powering hundreds of thousands of tiny lights, maybe it's that the people that saw fit to put those lights up were also perhaps the people who took out retarded mortgages on McMansions they couldn't quite afford. Who knows.

Thankfully, that means that there's been less of a focus on sheer wattage (2006):

and more focus on innovation:

Still, "old-fashioned" blitzkrieg houses still crop up. If you're gonna do it, I guess, do it for charity, like these guys (I have to admit I kinda dig this one)

MOSTLY UNRELATED NON CHRISTMAS BONUS VIDEO

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