My sister-in-law Gloriosa, who lives Uptown, spends a lot of time and money on her Christmas decorations every year. She got red ribbons twisted around her white porch pillars so they look like candy canes, and an inflatable Santa Claus in the porch swing, and little electric candles going up the walk.
Promptly on Dec. 26 she will take the Santa inside and put out a huge sign that says, “Happy New Year to All!” And she’ll roll red poster paper to look like giant firecrackers and put them out too.
A lot of people on her block do the same kind of thing. But there are some – she won’t name names – who will STILL have their gross moldy pumpkins out from Halloween. Or strings of black and orange lights on their roofs. In December!
This is Gloriosa. All the work she goes through to decorate for the right season at the right time – she already has this brilliant Mardi Gras display planned – and these people will probably just hang a couple strings of beads on their rotten pumpkins. Ugh.
She thinks about this a little too much. Then she comes up with an idea. She can anonymously give out awards and citations to the neighbors, based on how they decorate. She decides to call them K.A.R.E.N. (Keep All Residential Exteriors Nice) comments.
She gets on Amazon and orders huge blue-ribbon awards for the good neighbors, with “Best of Show” written on them, and black ribbons for the lazy ones. They read “Try Harder.”
Now she has to figure out how to award them, without nobody knowing who did it. She don’t want to mail them, because people who get the black ones won’t put them out. She wants them prominent.
She decides she’ll have to do it at night. But then she thinks about them Ring doorbells that take your picture at the door. So that’s no good.
She is telling me all about it when my teenage daughter Gladiola walks in. She says what Gloriosa needs to do is get on Amazon and order one of those stretchy form-fitting “morphsuits” – like those blue men wear – that cover you up from head to toe.
Then I say, “Get one in green, so you will be like the green screens that don’t show up on camera. And get one that covers your face.”
She thinks that’s a brilliant idea. She gets it all planned. She will make her deliveries a few days before Christmas Eve, so the black-ribbon bunch will have time to clean up their act. Maybe they’ll at least throw out the pumpkins.
We don’t know that green shows up on a doorbell camera just fine. What they do with the weatherman on TV talking in front of a green screen while we see him in front of a map is a lot more complicated than that.
Anyway, she gets up her nerve, and orders one, and late one night, she heads out, thinking she is as good as invisible. She’s got her son Comus along, and he has the awards in his wagon, but he keeps way back on the sidewalk so the doorbell cameras don’t see him in the dark.
She slaps up blue ribbons on the front doors by taping them to the door wreaths and puts the black ones on the moldy pumpkins. She also puts a blue ribbon on her own wreath, because if hers is the only house without one, it will give her away.
And now she’s gotten that out of her system, she feels peaceful and ready for Christmas.
Until two days later, when she opens the paper to this headline:
“Sexy Grinch Gives Neighbors Awards and Booby Prizes for Holiday Decor.”
And there’s a picture of her running around all in green. You can’t see her face, but Gloriosa happens to be very endowed in the bosom department. (I guess that’s why the headline reads “sexy.”) Everybody on the block knows exactly who did this.
Well. The blue-ribbon winners will be her best friends from now on. And maybe the black ribbon people will get rid of those pumpkins.
Peace on Earth.
