A Plateauy Christmas

Every year about this time boulevard St-Laurent, or rather the merchants association has a Christmas window decorating contest (pictures to come) and also has decorations put up all up the street. In the past they have been really nice and cool. The last five or 6 years have seemed like the designers are in a contest to see who can come up with the stupidest shit possible.

Recently we've been treated to what we like to call around my house "A 12 Monkeys Christmas", the decorators put up fairy lights (I love that UKism) and those strip lights on the trees on the boulevard and then wrapped the trees and the lights in Saran wrap™. Some people I know felt they looked like alien catapillers.

Another recent offering was the year they put up some over sized traditional Christmas decorations (so far so good) and huge fabric panels. In Montreal. In the Winter. How does the old joke go? "The wind she blow like one big hell!" A few weeks after they went up most of them were ripped to shreds. The ones that weren't were covered in a lovely veneer of slush and road salt kicked up by the passing traffic.

So it was with great trepidation that I noted the presence of designer type people with ladders out on St-Laurent a few weeks ago. But I had high hopes, "how much worse could it be?" I asked myself, and anyone who would listen.

MUCH MUCH WORSE BY FAR would appear to be the answer. Have you ever seen the pictures from the Himalayas of the prayer flags? Don't they look forlorn, stark and austere? Now imagine the same effect, intentional or otherwise, with Christmas decorations. The designers have run a series of ropes up the street on both sides from tree to lamp post etc. On the ropes, perfectly equidistant from each other are either traditional Christmas balls and bells or ribbons, cream colored ribbons. The ribbons have Christmas wishes written on them in different languages. They are held to the rope with that most festive of attachment devices, red duct tape.

You can see what I am talking about here. I tried to get a nice picture of the whole contraption, but then I realized that I couldn't, because it is so butt ugly. They have also put up some trees, and decorated them. These work (photos soon), but seem totally out of step with the other crap that it is confusing. It's like two design teams worked on the one project, one with budget and a clear plan and the other with a pile of left over crap from some hardware store.

In other news the snow really arrived this week and with it came slush. Also Lucas has been trying to relearn how to walk with his new winter boots, you can check out a video here. He has a whole robocop walk thing going on.