Our neighbors directly across the street in PA were our best friends. We did everything together. Our youngest children were even born on the same day! LOL It was weird because we were due two weeks apart but I had my son two weeks early. It was the talk of the neighborhood. That's another story though...
Anyway, their family adopted us for holidays. Our families were back in MA so we didn't have anyone to celebrate with. We would go over for dinner on Easter, Christmas, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, etc. They were Arabic (the wife and her family). I swear after a while I could tell what they were talking about! I was usually right.
Ok, I'm rambling. The reason I bring up the M's is on Christmas night, we would load the kids up in the van and go riding around looking for the best Christmas lights/display.
There was one house in Northeast Philly that actually lit up their lawn! They had rows of lights covering the entire front lawn and also the house. I wish I had pictures to post!
There was another house not too far from us. It was a million dollar home which was huge at that point (13-14 yrs. ago). Now it's not so rare. They had a walk through display. They had glass cases with beautiful moving Santas or Christmas scenes. Our kids loved this. The house was completely lit as well. They had a little box for donations but it wasn't required.
There was another neighborhood we went to that had a huge amount of lights. I don't know how their neighbors stood the brightness! It was a very posh neighborhood and their house lit the entire street! They had santas and elves who popped out at you and lights that blinked and did all kinds of cool things.
To this day, my kids remember those rides with the M's. We miss them dearly. I wonder if they still go for the ride....
I love looking at the Christmas lights. Barb-n-PA SBA
ReplyDeleteI always marvelled at houses that put up lights when we were kids- my parents always thought the lights were fire hazards.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great memory of sharing Christmas with your nieghbors-ie. your extended family. It is great to have such wonderful neighbors- my friends can't believe when I tell them that I would just walk into my neighbors house- without them having to answer the door.
That is a great feeling to have.
That is a great tradition and always fun to find that house with the most lights.
ReplyDeleteWe take walks around the neighborhood to look at lights and go a different way each night. We hardly ever put up lights, but we apparently feel qualified to critique other displays!
My favorite and probably most frightening light displays is when we go home to Long Island over the holidays. It is garish, obnoxious, yet somehow completely fascinating how many plastic figurines and lights one can place on a front lawn.
when i was a young, we would drive around town in our tricycle (another exotic transportation ;-) ... at night and look at the lights which the coke bottling company put up on top of their tall factories. There would be a huge coke bottle and something else like santa beside it. Its very simple but it was fascinating. We didn't light our front fence / garden area. We once had a star (handcrafted)outside but people would steal it if you leave it out overnight. So we kept the lights inside our house (on our tree) and the star at the foot of our stairs.
ReplyDeleteI am amazed to see how many things people put in front of their lawn .. it looks really nice but I keep thinking that I have no room to store them at other times of the year. So I am still just lighting our tree.