Christmas Light Army has no fear of snobs – Susan Morrison

Houses so bedecked with Christmas lights they could confuse airline pilots are things of wonder, writes Susan Morrison
The more lights the merrier as far as Susan is concernedThe more lights the merrier as far as Susan is concerned
The more lights the merrier as far as Susan is concerned

When I were a lass, Christmas was a lot smaller. There was a tree on the Mound and we put white lights on it. Elegant and very presbyeterian.

Granted, when you went to Glasgow, George Square was as riotously coloured as Elton John’s tour wardrobe, but that was to be expected.

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Now Edinburgh and Glasgow appear to be engaged in some sort of Christmas lights arms race, hellbent on literally outshining the opposition. To get the biggest, brightest and best they bend rules, divert traffic and entirely redraw planning regulations.

Sometimes you feel like Christmas is something being done to us, not for us, or by us.

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So, all hail the renegade Christmas Light Army. The people who look at the multi-million-pound corporate extravaganzas and say: “Who needs cooncil lights? Let’s get the outside of this house looking like Christmas, and to hell with the leccy bill.”

I’ve seen houses so dazzling there’s a serious danger of an incoming EasyJet mistaking the front drive for the airport, which would be a disaster for the light up Santa’s Grotto/Snow White and the Seven Dwarves mash up on the front lawn.

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Snobs will decry these houses of light and call them tasteless and tacky. What do they know, my lovers of an LED colour-changing Santa and Sleigh with Moving Reindeer, programmable to shout ‘ho, ho, ho’ once an hour?

Why bother what the purveyors of the minimalist Yuletides think, with their Scandi interiors and those weird wooden things that look like Christmas tree skeletons?

Carry on dazzling passing drivers, incoming airline pilots and the crew of the International Space Station.

Christmas? You own it.