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What's happening at YourHub.com: Holiday lights
Contributed by: Brendan Leonard/YourHub.com on 11/16/2005

Greetings from YourHub.com World Headquarters.
Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, and I'll bet by this point, you've already got your plans made for the 24th, whether they involve a giant feast at your house or your mother's house or your mother-in-law's house, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or never leaving your couch and watching all of the five or so football games that will be televised on Turkey Day.
The turkeys are panicking, and you might be as well, because you know the holiday shopping season is nearly upon us. Black Friday marks the commencement of the four- or five-week period in which you have to find the absolute perfect gift for every one of your friends and family, or be cast out of their lives forever. There will be competition -- you may be pushed, or shoved, or be the recipient of some nasty language on your way to grab the last mp3 player, Elmo doll, or whatever it is that makes the kids happy these days.
But there's relief from that, often to be found in decorating the exterior of your home with thousands of blinking lights. I have many a good memory of scaling the roof of my parents' house with a staple gun in one hand and a string of lights in the other, hoping to both improve on last year's design and not fall to my death. We usually did okay, and kept the display under 1,000 lights.
Last year, I was living in Arizona, a few miles away from a guy named Chris Birkett, who strung up 125,000-some lights on his house and added a snow machine, in a choreographed performance that repeated every six minutes from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Every night.
The night we went to see the display, there were cars parked on both sides of the street on every street in a three-block radius. Two policemen kept watch over the crowd and traffic.
The show was something like seeing Times Square or the Vegas Strip, which apparently didn't fit in in Birkett's quiet neighborhood. His neighbors complained, and this summer, he was fined and given two years' probation for his holiday cheer. Here are some photos of Birkett's displays from previous years.
We'd like to see some photos of your holiday displays -- and you don't have to go overboard or involve the police to impress us. We just want to see some regular old holiday cheer from your neighborhood, like these folks.
Or, if you like to go overboard, like these folks, or these folks, or even these folks, send us those photos too.
Click here to share your photos.
Or e-mail them directly to me here.
Have a great day, and try not to get too stressed about the upcoming holidays.
-Brendan Leonard, Community Journalist


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