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December 17, 2014

CityMetric Advent 17: Your town's craziest Christmas decorations, mapped

By City Monitor Staff

Whether you love Christmas, or hate it, it helps to know where the festivities are occurring – either so you can flock to light displays and Santa’s grottos, or avoid them like the plague.

Helpfully, there’s now a map (and an app) for that. Nextdoor, a neighborhood mapping app, has launched a “Holiday Cheer Map” in time for Jesus’s birthday. The map crowdsources Christmas donation points, events and attractions, tree vendors, Santa’s grottos, and, most importantly, the locations of your area’s most outlandish Christmas light displays. It puts them all together on a map of your neighborhood, a bit like this one of Seattle:

The light displays range from large public ones sponsored by shops, to smaller neighbourhood displays with enigmatic names like “Larry’s Window” or “Neighbour’s House”. 

Unfortunately, the map only covers US towns. But perhaps this is fair enough, as the US is the unofficial world capital of terrible light displays. Take this horrible Christmas prison from Illinois:

Or the Christmas lights that dance to the tune of Gangnam Style: 

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A map to help us all avoid the likes of these would be much appreciated. 

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