Do You Decorate Your Ride for Christmas?

"Oh please, don't put that red bow on me. Don't I look jolly enough?"

Some people just LOVE to decorate. There are plenty of people out there who fill their yards up year-round with wall-to-wall garden gnomes, pink flamingos, little boys bending over and revealing their underwear, and plenty of other tacky crap. (Not that I’m dissing all of this, really; I have a couple of gnomes—though painted to look more like characters from King Arthur—myself; I’m dissing the ginormous junk pile of it all accumulating in one tiny half-acre lot.)

My husband and I like to call these yards “yard parks,” though I suppose the proper term would be “kitsch vomit.”

Some people extend their mad decorating skillz to their vehicles as well. I have to raise my hand and plead guilty to this, too; in my last car, a self-declared hippie mobile Taurus wagon, I had tie-dye seats, peace beads hanging from the rearview mirror, a plastic dinosaur glued to the dash and even a pillow in the backseat I made out of an old Goonies t-shirt and safety pins. Oh yeah, did I love that car.

But I never even thought to give it a Rudolph nose.

Do you decorate your car for Christmas? Maybe you wrap tinsel around the antenna. Maybe you put those big fat Santa and Frosty static clings to your back glass, or even spray on some fake snow. Perhaps you add antlers to your brown car, add on the aforementioned Rudolph nose, and speed down the highway like you’re a thousand-year-old man with a midlife crisis and a lot of toys to give away.

I’ve also seen cars decked out with Christmas lights inside (I guess they were Christmas lights—perhaps they were simply decorative car lights?), giant bows on the front (dragging into the dirty, snowy asphalt, no less), and more stuffed Christmas beanie babies in the back window than I’d ever want to see in a lifetime.

If you do decorate your car, more power to you. Who am I to criticize? Your Santa antenna ball might look cheesy to me, but my array of bumper stickers probably isn’t appealing to your eye, either, is it? You’re probably just a creative kook like me, wanting to add a bit of sparkle to an otherwise boring commute. Just be safe while you’re out there, road-sharer. I don’t want to see you crash because your string of lights broke loose and got caught on a guard rail.