This website – and my Sunday Recommendations email list – are dedicated to art that’s inspiring, thought-provoking, skillfully executed, and/or breathtakingly beautiful. Once a year, I stretch that to include fabulous events, decorations, clothing, and jewelry on display during the holiday season. Capitalist Christmas pics from previous years are here. This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/r_GeKo7Fvas.
When I lived in New York City, I didn’t realize just how much money and effort stores expend on their Christmas decorations, compared to those in other areas of the country. It’s a bit more difficult to find fantastic displays on the west coast of Florida! But if I head out with a sense of wonder, I always find some.
Sanding Ovations
Sanding Ovations is a sand-sculpture competition on the beach at Treasure Island, Florida, on the west side of the St. Petersburg peninsula. Held in late November, this competition is the signal that the holidays (and the snowbirds and vacationers) are coming: the sculptures last through the holiday season. My favorite this year is Humpty Dumpty – Government Contract, sculpted by Damon Meri & Bruce Phillips. Made with 9 tons of sand, in 2 days. It won third place in the competition.
According to the signs at the competition, this is real sand, although not from the beach in St. Pete. The sand is dampened and compacted into wooden forms, working in 2-foot height increments. When the sculptors reach the desired height they start removing the wood at the top, and sculpt it as they move downward. Every sculpture is solid sand and water: no internal structure. The wires at the top of the taller sculptures are to keep off birds, whose talons damage the sculpture when they take off.
Shops at Wiregrass
During December, the Shops at Wiregrass (Wesley Chapel, Florida) offer a 10-minute program several times each evening of Trans-Siberian Orchestra music coordinated with the flashing lights of a giant tree. Short videos here and here. Below: before-and-after stills of the tree.
Diversity in Christmas decorations
The Old Lutz School House, just north of Tampa, has several rooms densely packed with decorations, including a 12-foot-long table full of firemen and a patriotic Christmas tree.
Part of a massive Lego project.
Maybe because I’ve usually spent Christmas at home in the northeastern United States, I never realized there could be any variety in a creche. Here are some of the two dozen or so examples at the Old Lutz School House.
A Holidays Collide display.
Daniella & Brooke Quintana: I like your style!
Dade City’s Church Street Christmas
Dade City, Florida, has for years been doing lavish Christmas displays along Church Street with musical entertainment and free hot chocolate and cookies. No admission, no fees anywhere.
I am very jealous of the porches on these historic homes, particularly this one.
Musicians performing on a porch …
… and the Dade City Symphony giving a free performance of Christmas medleys at the First Baptist Church, which has remarkably good acoustics.
Gingerbread competition! I had no idea this was even a thing people do.
And of course there are the usual range of inflatables on display. Multiple Grinches: oh, I’m so scared!
Alligator Santa. No, wait, Dinosaur Santa. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile Santa? Anyway … he literally outshines the “real” Santa next to him.
My personal favorite character among the inflatables. Galaxies collide in this yard.
Silly gifts
What Christmas means to me
Ayn Rand, 1976:
A national holiday, in this country, cannot have an exclusively religious meaning. The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: “Merry Christmas”—not “Weep and Repent.” And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance . . . .
The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only “commercial greed” could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.
Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Calendar, Dec. 1976, quoted in the Ayn Rand Lexicon
