Christmas in the Hood

It's sweet on my street -- there are three houses clustered together who have outdone each other in piling on the lights, candy cane gutter ornaments, and illuminated reindeer, heads nodding, up and down, up and down.

One little house has overstuffed its tiny front lawn with three giant inflatable characters, too. And though it's January 4th, the twinkling lights still shine at these humble palaces of glitter.

I was Scroogelike and tore down every scrap of Christmas on December 30th. It was all out the door on New Year's Eve, and my house was swept clean and made ready for 2007.

But my next-door neighbors keep theirs up, with the candy-cane lights ringing the porch, a wreath on the door, and a big, puffy, inflatable Santa and snowman on their lawn. One night I came home and saw my neighbor Ana bending over the inflatables in the dusk, tenderly examining their deflated forms to see why they'd fallen.

Of course, even amidst the holiday cheer there are disturbances. Three nights before Christmas, I woke from a delicious deep sleep at 2:40 a.m. to the awful racket of the loudest music I'd ever heard, slowly rolling towards my house like thunder from the middle of the block. Deafening, shaking the house, it was some sort of lethargic rap with a heavy beat.

I sprang to the window and what to my wondering eyes should appear but an obese gold SUV with some of the charming youth from the house in the middle of the block dancing and prancing on the roof, out the open doors, steaming down the street at about 3 miles an hour. They seemed to be having a pretty good time. I called the police, and they didn't come.
After a while, this festival of inconsideration stopped.

A few days later, I read an article in the Oakland Tribune about ghost riding, which is what was up for the wee-hours parade down my street. Ghost riding is a celebrated fad in which the driver of a car puts it in neutral and while the car is veering through the lane, the "driver" gets out and dances on top of the car, often running into other immobile objects in the process. Great.