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Since there's no snow here, people put Christmas lights all through their yards, along the edges of lawns, etc. The wife and I love to go driving through some of the neighborhoods just to look at the lights.

Here in MA people, are starting to do huge lawn displays at Christmas. One of our traditions is to take the kids on a drive through town on Christmas night. We love going by houses and laughing at the garish displays. We yell out 'tacky alert' (in our closed car, of course)when we see a particularly egregious one.

A few years ago, a man in town had about 100 different lighted displays in his yard, covering all the bases. He had a Creche, snowmen, Santa, Rudolph and all the reindeer, angels, the Peanuts characters, etc., not to mention the lights hanging from his house and several trees in the yard. When you drove near his street, you thought something was on fire because of the glow from the lights. Two weeks before Christmas we had a HUGE snowstorm that dumped about a foot and a half of snow. That man shoveled almost all of that snow out of his yard over the next week, and his yard looked like it had just gotten a dusting of snow!

One of our traditions is to take the kids on a drive through town on Christmas night.

Richmond is so stuck in the past that all the "colonial" homes only decorate with white lights in the windows. But a few revolutionaries (and I'm building up my own display) go all out.

Now there is an official Tacky Lite Tour List. The media outlets all publicize them and tour companies rent limosines to take people around for the displays.

For a few years we had two houses in our neighborhood who kept trying to outdo each other on their light displays (they were across the street from each other). Every few days you could drive by their houses and one or the other would have some new light display added to their yard... it was a lot of fun seeing how they would try to top each other!

There are some neighborhoods here where the only displays are plain white lights, around the edges of the houses, up and down the roofs, through the yard... I used to think plain white lights would be boring, but the sheer number of lights used makes it look fantastic, like something out of a fairy tale. In some places it's bright enough to drive up and down the streets at night with the car lights off...