Toads-in-the-Hole

I strive not to be a snob, I really do. I was raised by humble nomadic people, and our idea of decor generally consisted of a foundation of several months of New Yorkers supported by flying buttresses of dog hair. As such, I find myself naturally snobbish about snobbishness, judgmental about those who are exclusive and narrow-minded about decor and cleanliness. Yet we all have our limits. I have a horror of dirty dishes, for example, and will go out of my way to pick up discarded beer bottles off of my lawn (a year-long sport, here in Verm-town), and I recently became scornful of inflatable lawn decorations.

We've seen a sudden surge in these here in the midwest this year. Where a few had them in the whole town, now every block boasts at least one house with at least one inflatable decoration. A few feature multiple bobbing figures, and not just for Christmas, but also for Halloween and Thanksgiving.

While these decorations are very eye-catching and festive, I have two chief objections. The first is their environmental impact. While a few strings of 100-bulb lights running for 9 hours require 1.5 kilowatt hours, your eight-foot tall Waving Santa with a spotlight will suck up 43. I am becoming more and more of a Carbon Nazi as I learn more about global warming. This year's El Nino winter has made me especially nervous. We had 14 days of 40+ degree weather this past December (four days above 50, and one day with a high of 65!). So, while a giant polar bear may raise everyone's Christmas spirit, it also raises the probability of the extinction of the polar bear.

My other objection, alas, is entirely aesthetic. If the owner of the inflatable decoration leaves them inflated all day, then their energy usage doubles. If, on the other hand, the owner turns them off, they collapse on the ground, invariably making me think they were the victims of a savage drive-by shooting by some guerilla group of anti-materialists (which, now that I put it that way, is kind of bittersweet). Neither of these options is satisfactory to my high tastes, but least palatable is the third option: leaving them inflated all day, all night, but also allowing them to become untethered. Here's my shining example, Homer Santa appears to have passed out after having one too many holiday nogs.