New Year’s Day 2013 and a Mad Santa House

The new year started with rain and truly miserable weather. Like every year, we visited some friends of my parents who live in Teufelsmoor (devil’s moor), a bog region north of Bremen. We had lunch at a really good Greek restaurant in the village of Sandhausen and afterwards coffee in the restored farmhouse, which is the home of the people we visited.

I was feeling out of sorts all day and the miserable weather and constant rain didn’t help either. I did take my camera along, though I didn’t get around to taking any moorland photos, because the weather was simply too bad. And considering that the Teufelsmoor is a bog and the people we visited live in a very secluded location accessible only via an unpaved driveway, the entire area turned very muddy very quickly. Teufelsmoor is actually quite nice, when the weather is better. Though I’m “moored out” for at least a couple of months now, since I spent way too much time at Teufelsmoor as a child and can now only tolerate the place in very small doses. Though I’d like to roam the moors again in summer, since all of my good Teufelsmoor memories involve slipping away and roaming the moors on my own.

Though I do have a photo today. Well, actually I have more than one, but I don’t think that the friends of my parents are all that interesting to the readers of this blog.

But on the way home, I chanced to drive past a house that was excessively decorated with Christmas lights. Now decorating your house with lots of Christmas lights is not all that common in Germany, largely because the energy costs are so high that extensive Christmas lighting would really cut into your budget.

We do get the occasional all out decorations, but it’s uncommon. And unlike the US, where even extensive and multi-coloured Christmas lights still manage to look pretty (see the blog of my pal R. Doug Wicker for some gorgeous examples), the German examples usually tend to look somewhat haphazard and tacky, as if a DIY store vomitted its entire Christmas department onto a random suburban house.

I tend to call these excessively decorated houses Christmas Apocalypses or Mad Santa Houses. And today I drove past a prime example, a house where everything was blinking and flashing in a riot of multi-coloured lights.

Mad Santa House with way too many Christmas lights.