On my way home from work one recent night, I was reminded how little I’d seen this year in the way of bad Christmas lights. I hadn’t exactly gone miles out of my way to look for them, of course, and maybe I’d just seen fewer light displays in total. On the course of my daily travels, though, I’d seen maybe one set of blinking orange candles; that dentist’s office had managed to fit its light netting to its front window and keep it from drooping too much; the few lit-up inflatable lawn ornaments at least had quiet fans; and I hadn’t noticed any egregious examples of kaleidoscope light projectors.

I was reminded of all this, of course, when someone turned on their egregious example of kaleidoscope light projection.

They didn’t miss the side of their house from ten feet away, so it wasn’t the worst example I’ve every seen, but it was still aggressively underwhelming. Imagine a bunch of dots, changing color palettes every several seconds, some more seasonally appropriate than others. Then imagine four big cartoon snowflakes bouncing back and forth between the edges of the field of dots like one of the lesser Windows screensavers.

You’ll have to imagine this, because my picture captured very little of it.

The idea, of course, was to avoid posting potentially creeptastic pictures of the front of someone’s house.. (I took a pic of that dentist’s office the year of their offense, but on examination, the business name was visible on the awning, so I didn’t post it.) So I focused on the projector instead and the mess it was making of the pre-snowfall lawn.

It isn’t the worst picture I’ve ever taken (admittedly a low bar), but it doesn’t really express what I wanted it to at the time.

I didn’t even get a shot of some of the less appropriate color palettes; there were purple and green (Halloween) and red, white, and blue (Fourth of July?) palettes mixed in.