Barely 50 metres from where I write this there sits primly a house that nightly draws from the National Grid an amount of power many will consider morally and pragmatically reprehensible. It’s drawing power from the National Grid is exceeded only by its drawing power for a bored local populace (this is Christchurch, after all) attracted to this latest evocation of imported American tradition—the external electrification and decoration of the residential home. Rhinestone Cowboy meets Liberace meets Universal Homes. The people who perpetrate this upon us are undoubtedly good people. Not only do they enter into the Christmas spirit with gay abandon (and some may well be), they generously share it with the rest of us. But there is a dark side to this light display. I am told that it is getting an increasingly competitive art form with homes on streets and even entire streets vying aggressively with each other for the most ornate—read facile—displays. There are dark mutterings of huge expenditures, and even competing displays being damaged or stolen. Jealousy and envy are making their insidious ways up these light-saturated paths. I personally cannot attest to any of this: my refusal to enter this arena, either as a competitor or as a spectator, is abject. My sole contribution to Christmas display I intend to be my traditional display of pique that my wife won’t let me play Snoopy’s Christmas. My sole foray into Christmas spirit will be copious quantities of single-malt scotch. I am singularly ill equipped therefore to provide a balanced viewpoint on this issue. But that hasn’t stopped Fryday before. So let me say that whilst these homes undoubtedly provide much pleasure to entire families who ooh and arr over them to the extent that there is a mess next morning on the footpaths, and the intent of the people who pay and display them is commendable, we nevertheless have here an example of something just a little bit silly. Something else imported from the country that also gave us Halloween and George W. Bush. It’s here to stay. I’m just not sure it's our way. Merry Christmas.
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The Long Walk Back
Someone, it may have been Will Rogers, once said of California that it was as if the United States had tilted, and all the country’s nuts ...
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