My Blog! My Blog!

I've posted quite a few entries about my neighbor down the street who makes a hobby of decorating his home and yard for each holiday, no matter how minor.

However, I can't make fun of him for decorating his home for Christmas, because Christmas is the one holiday on which nearly everybody decorates here, and many homeowners are even more extravagant than my neighbor is. So tonight, after the season's first big snow has made our town look like a picture postcard even without decoration, I roamed outside with my digital camera, looking for homes to photograph.

I found plenty of homes, but my skill with a digital camera is insufficient to show the blaze of glory some of these homes are when seen by the naked human eye. (Deplorably, the photo I took of my eccentric neighbor's home came out particularly badly, and thus is not featured here.) Still, some of the photos may give you an idea of the spectrum of Malvernian decorating efforts. I'm too cheap to have an account that would allow me to post the pictures here, but you can view them in my Picasa album through the links provided.

First, here is my own pathetic modest effort.

Here is the home of my next-door neighbor (the one who's given up trying to get me to trim my carnivorous bushes). Her son-in-law helped plow my driveway this weekend with his front-end loader after our 18-inches of blizzard, so I can't complain about her anymore, really. I just wish the photo captured the beauty of the colored lights all over her front yard bushes better.

Here, here and here are some more homes on Karen Drive, arrayed in various degrees of complexity and brightness.

And here and here are a few decorations on nearby King Street of which I got passable photos. I wish I could have captured the willow trees hung with multicolored lights better.

The owner of the house down the street from me took down his St. Patrick's Day decorations this weekend.

I was puzzled by this (St. Patrick's Day isn't for another week) until I noticed this morning that he'd put up bunnies and eggs for Easter, which comes really early this year (the week after St. Patrick's Day, in fact). Guess he didn't want to risk missing out on decorating for Easter.

The Easter tree in the front window has to be seen to be believed.

In other news, there's a real estate office on our main street. It has a row of nice poinsettia plants in its window, presumably placed there originally for Christmas. In an effort to update the display, the realtors have stuck a green glitter shamrock in each pot. It looks kinda nice, but since it continues the red-and-green theme it doesn't really erase the "held over from Christmas" impression.

I'm hoping they don't follow up with Easter bunnies.

It has an entry about Malvern, the place where I live. Better still, it's a really good entry, with a photograph of our train station that looks as though it belongs on a postcard and cleverly hides its creeping decrepitude. Neat.