Insane Holiday Displays

I've always wanted to be in one of those families that goes hog wild on the holidays and spends a fortune on the outside display; lights, fog systems, and crazy demonoid figures that dance and sing and shoot out faux spider webs at unsuspecting passer-by.

Only around Christmas time (the biggest Holiday) I was lucky to see a a humble string of white lights outlining the front porch of my house or acouple sprigs of holly here and there and the occassional akwardly-placed string of blue lights (why blue?!? that's not even a christmas color.) strewn about on a bush that very closely resembled a crayon drawing by a three year old.

Then there are always those contests around Halloween time especially up here in suburbia that require approx. 700x more expense to create the display that it is to win the contest. My friend's dad is one of those people, and happens to win the contest for his neighborhood every year. Literally 2,000 feet around the corner of a block filled with an evil array including a piano with a skeleton pianist, multiple machines of dancing ghouls and goblins, even a devil's social club set up by the side porch that a passer by could walk onto and look around in... with patio heaters!

On top of outdoor heaters, he had assembled a ghastly crew of skeleton friends equipt with misting sytems that would unsuspectingly grasp at you upon setting foot on his front porch. This made it hard for me to visit my friend without getting groped... for 2 months! I understand why he would leave it up that long, I'm sure it's famous in its own way and he gets much enjoyment out of it, as does anyone that puts that much effort into something like that, but that's just intrusive on life in general.

...Maybe I'm just being bitter.