So... I think it was two years ago I saw this special on TLC about the tackiest christmas lights in the country. It turns out that Richmond, VA has a huge percentage of the homes that were on this show, and if you go to http://www.tackylighttour.com/ you can find houses in your area that made it onto the list. So I figured there's a good chance we won't be in this area next Christmas so we should take a trip to Richmond and see some of the houses. Now, tacky is just a fun and general term used to describe any house that has 20,000 lights or more. If you go to the website you'll see the winners of the tacky awards are split into categories such as kid friendly, classiest, most likely to be seen from space, etc.
Richmond is 2 hours away and it gets dark around 5:00. So about 3:30 we headed out the door with a map in hand and high hopes for a fun night. Well after the 2 hours into town, including some traffic on a busy street leading to the first area of houses, we found our first tacky lights. Basically one street had all of the houses decorated and it was pretty cool, but nothing special. The kids were getting restless so we went for dinner. Richmond has one of Dan's favorite restaurants from Cincinnati called Penn Station. They have really really yummy philly cheesesteaks. It was good and we were all feeling a bit more in the mood for light touring.
The first really 'wow' house that we came to was this one.
You'll see in the slideshow that they had their whole backyard and side area of their house lit as well. Cade was lovin' the lights, but lovin' the snow more than anything else. Richmond had had a winter storm over the weekend and the whole area had a good 8-10 inches of snow. Cade got to throw snowballs, make snow angels, and eat it too. He was in heaven.
Next we went to the house that was awarded the 'best overall'. The description online said it had 250,000 lights and when we were driving down the street leading up to the house you could see it in the distance. It was swarming with traffic and pedestrians so we parked the car and got out. As we got closer we could see that it wasn't just one, but two houses (a mother and son) who worked together to make this monstrosity of lights and displays. Call it tacky, feel bad for the neighbors or whatever, but this was pretty cool. All of the pictures start to look the same, but take a second and pause the slideshow and look at all of the stuff this place had. The kids loved it.
It was getting pretty late and we had spent a lot of time at that last house so we headed home, hoping to stop by the 'kid friendliest' house on the way. We got there and you could see hundreds of inflatables all dead on the ground and no lights on. :(
So next time, if there ever is a next time, it would be nice if there wasn't the 2 hour round trip travel involved, or our fussy kids, but the one spectacular house was oddly worth it all. Hope you enjoy the pictures. (the finished product of our little craft is in there too)
Merry Christmas everyone!
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