Mar 8, 2009 -- 9:23PM, Linda wrote:

The most amazing thing I've seen here are incredibly tacky plastic blow-up yard decorations. That and the silly plastic eggs hung on trees.  Cheez-tastic.

Oh yes  and I often thought how the merchants are so creative... first it was only Christmas... then Hallowe'en, now it is every holiday out there and, for me, the beauty of yard decorations lose their appeal when one never gets to see the yard in its original pristine (or not) condition.

I used to love taking pictures of people's yard decorations. I got so many ideas for my own Christmas display.  But for me, the other holidays are more personal, Easter is/was traditional breakfast at Mom's. Decorations were subtle and housebound.

Hallowe'en was all about fixing up the inside of the house to errrr scare the kiddies when they came to the door.

Mar 10, 2009 -- 12:17AM, Tede wrote:

Yeah I have to agree that the eggs hanging in trees is cheesy. Around here people leave their Christmas tree's up till New Years, then they remove the decorations and add Mardi Gras decorations and after Mardi Gras they remove the decorations only to add Easter decorations.

ROFL! I call those neighborhood's of sparklers Tra La La Villages. I've found two ways that seem to help cure/curb it. One: I lived in an upper scaled area in New Jersey where they pulled out all the stops when decorating their yards for Christmas. Well, you get next door to two houses burning 2,099,123,481 little white lights all night - combine them with the glare of snow and it's like living in a prison. And the traffic on our cul de sac road ... oh, just too much for me. So, I got on my roof with two strings of red lights and purposely misspelled "Mery Chrissmus".  I stole all their traffic and interest - they got mad and started turning out the lights at a decent hour.

Okay, now for those who insist on leaving the lights up til the nails rust and they fall of natural causes. I printed up some "citations" claiming them to be from the homeowner's association and taped them to doors telling the extending celebratbrats that there was a new ordinance that all decorations and lights must be down within 10 days of January 1st. And that, if they weren't, a steep fine could be imposed and Homeowner fees would have to be increased to assist them with removal.

But two of the reasons I simply must keep a camcorder handy at all times. Sometimes you can't just "let" ... and you can capture some truly priceless looks and reactions.

Hehehehehe Keven!!

Well, this isn't really a tradition anybody here probably wants to copy, but around here it's gotten to be a joke that the kids put on camoflauge when we decorate eggs.  It all started when I went to scrapbook pictures from two Easters in a row and saw that my kids had on camo shirts.  I could not find any background paper or colors that would work with the photos.  The pastel eggs and the green and tan of the camo was just plain ugly together.  Now they do it on purpose! 

Another variation we have done on the Easter egg hunt is to hide our eggs with the GPS and do our egg hunt geocaching-style!  Another Mom and I went to a park the day before Easter and hid the eggs and wrote down coordinates.  Then we gave the coordinates to the kids for the hunt the next day.  It was much harder than we thought it would be!  Some were never found!

The Greek side of my family celebrate usually the week after, on Orthodox Easter.  One tradition is to take hard boiled, colored eggs and each person hold one in their hand.  They then 'tap' another one's egg and keep going until one person is left with an uncracked egg.  They also bake a quarter in a bread braid the person who gets that piece is supposed to be lucky.  I think that's the same bread that boiled eggs are baked on the top part, too - not sure though.  I remember as a kid celebrating two Easters - one on the Greek side and one on the English (UK) side.  It was fun!