Growing up in mitte middle-class New Jersey, I spent much of my adolescence riddled with an unbecoming status anxiety. I was forever worried that not having the right clothes, or the right backpack, or the right sunglasses, would mark me as not belonging to the smart set. The fact that there was no smart set—and that if there had been, I wouldn’t have belonged anyway—was lost on me.
This class consciousness was so pervasive that it even influenced my taste in Christmas decorations. I grew up in a colored-lights family. But when my status anxiety manifested around age 14, I persuaded them to switch our tree to white lights.
This change was not undertaken lightly. You are either a colored-lights family or a white-lights family, and changing your Christmas tree light color is like changing your religion or your political affiliation—it’s something people do, at most, once in their lives. But white lights seemed classier to my teenaged self, so I petitioned the family, and we made the switch.
My brother and sister were similarly inclined, and the three of us had a bemused contempt for people who decorated the exterior of their homes in what we thought to be an undignified manner. Large colored lights, inflatable Santas, blinking reindeer, those ubiquitous, light-up candy-canes. To us, the yuletide ideal was a single white electric candle in each window of the house. For whatever reason, it seemed classy.
I now live on a little cul-de-sac in exurban Virginia that is the exact opposite of classy. My neighborhood features the whole parade of horribles: blinking, flashing lights; inflatable lawn sculptures the size of igloos; one house has an illuminated trio of Star Wars characters posed as the Three Wise Men on the front lawn. And my neighbors love to share.
After the first Christmas, when I didn’t put up any decorations outside our house, the lady next door—a sweet, Christian Secret Service agent—presented me with a shiny, four-foot-tall aluminum Snoopy, ringed by blinking lights. I tried to demur, but she insisted not only on giving it to me but helping me set it up, too. I was both touched and horrified.
When she moved away, blinking Snoopy went up into the attic, and we went back to having no Christmas decorations. I thought this was perfectly normal. My neighbors did not.
Rich asked me about it a couple years ago. “Is there something wrong?” he asked—in a sympathetic, not sarcastic—tone. “Do you just not like Christmas?” Rich lives in the pipestem next to us and is such an enthusiastic Christmas decorator that he spends the weekend before Thanksgiving every year crawling around the roof of his house to trim the entire structure in dangling icicle lights.
But that’s just the start. As I write this, I’m gazing out at Rich’s front lawn. There are 10 reindeer, 5 snowmen, 3 peacocks, an Eiffel Tower, and much, much more. Rich’s lawn menagerie has grown over the years so that it eventually spilled over into his next-door neighbor Michelle’s property. This year, he outgrew her yard, too. Over the summer, a nice Muslim family from Afghanistan moved into the house on the other side of Michelle. Their front yard is now home to the overflow of Rich’s overflow decorations.
And so, shamed by Rich’s example and my Muslim neighbors’ good cheer and forbearance, this year I bought a Christmas decoration for the outside of the house. It’s a laser projector that shines thousands of tiny, moving red and green dots on the façade of the house. And this is not just any projector: It’s the one “As Seen on TV.” Which makes it extra not-classy.
The overall effect is not subtle. The lasers aren’t powerful enough to be seen from space, but the box says that you shouldn’t use them if you live within 10 nautical miles of an airport. If you want to picture the aesthetic, imagine the North Pole if Kris Kringle ran a disco that doubled as a strip club.
It’s tacky. It’s terrible. And I loved it so much that five minutes after setting it up, I ordered a second one.
I don’t know if this is a sign that I’ve finally outgrown my status anxiety. Or given up on being part of the smart set. A sociologist might say that I’ve simply reanchored my social norms.
But whatever the case, I’m awfully cheery this Advent. And next year I might even petition the family to change our tree to colored lights.
