The Suburban Cold War

A luxury sedan with GPS, an SUV with GPS, television, and automatic seat warmers, a basketball net above the garage door, an NBA Polycarbonate 54-inch Portable Basketball System, an in-ground swimming pool with diving board, and a Jacuzzi.

A cabana, a hammock to relax, a man-made fishpond to gaze into while relaxing, a hamster, a hamster maze, a hamster palace with hamster servants decorated with palm fronds, an Olympic-size trampoline, a tree house, a guest house, a repaved driveway, a gravel driveway with landscaped edges, and a refinished wooden deck and state-of-the-art barbeque.

An extended deck with outdoor kitchen/barbeque/wood and coal burning pizza oven, a solarium off the living room, a bar, pool table, and DJ booth in the basement.

In towns across Long Island, quality of life battles are fought among neighbors daily, and with the annual approach of Christmas, as the neighbors are driven to the hedges to advertise the good life in colorful displays of Yuletide cheer, the front lawns become the front lines.

Ours is a Cold War of which we never speak, ever escalating, with tensions reaching their zenith each December in the highly anticipated battle of outdoor Christmas decorations. During the Christmas season, Ibsen Court—a short street in an affluent suburb of Suffolk County, in the heart of Dix Hills, New York where I grew up—becomes a festive war-zone.

Every morning as we waited for the school bus, the kids would discuss the holiday displays our parents had mounted, appraising each house as if we were tiny art critics and Ibsen Court were a gallery. Instead of swirling our wine, we’d rub out a design onto our Freezie Freakies, or pack a snowball tight into our fists and then thoughtfully shake our head at one or another nativity scene before giving our final verdict. “Derivative. The manger is rendered so literally.” The most powerful critic among us was our Jewish neighbor Amy Buchman. Because her family didn’t participate in this particular competition, but donned only a simple menorah that blinked out to the street from their picture window, she could be the most impartial and it was tacitly decided that Amy’s was the final voice.

Our aesthetic was: the brighter, the bigger, the better! We felt sympathy for Julie Smith down the street, whose parents hung nothing but an oversized wreath every year. And hovering about Nicole Randolph was an unmentionable air of shame: her father used only the larger, duller bulbs on one set of hedges out front, unevenly spaced at that, pronouncing a sad sort of “Merry Christmas.” Michelle and Rusty Lenane had the misfortune of being born to parents with class. Their house, two doors down, was adorned sparingly in a single string of twinkling white lights circling the trunk of a tree like a modest a set of pearls.

And then there was my parents’ front lawn, entirely barren on Christmas. Our house was at the bottom of a hill, so that a set of tall pines obfuscated our house’s face and the very important picture window, which our neighbors purposefully kept clear of curtains, so that when others drove by they could bare witness to the happiness inside. My parents hadn’t bothered to hang decorations outside, but merely decked our hall privately, inside, around our own Christmas tree, mistaking joy as having nothing to do with igniting pain and jealousy in others.

The main contenders in the competition were the Meadowcrofts and the Califanos, whose houses were adjacent to each other. Like the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. they had been vying neck and neck in every event for years, perennially matching and then trumping the other's move. Both mothers were feverish borrowers of sugar and their close friendship only intensified their mutual antagonism. I imagined their get-togethers were like the initial talks of Reagan and Gorbachev, the two completely hitting it off, yet unable finally to fashion a workable treaty: Mrs. Califano could not see her way to give up Star Wars—a theoretical decoration technology still in development that promised to shoot down foreign Santa Clauses by satellite. Both Meadowcrofts and Califanos enthusiastically pursued the very latest in Christmas decorations and spared no expense in creating an entirely new extravaganza each year.  

Mounting the spectacle was also a spectacle. It required the assembly of the entire Meadowcroft family on the front lawn for the duration of the Thanksgiving weekend. They worked cooperatively, demonstrating their commitment to happiness and good cheer for all the neighbors to see. The competition reached a frenzy in 1992 when, after working all weekend to hang lights in a manner similar to the Califano’s already completed display, the Meadowcrofts unveiled their secret weapon—a life-size Santa Claus pulled by reindeer on their roof. The Califanos were destroyed. The following year they retaliated with a biblical tableau set up near their porch. Bethlehem—manger, donkey, the three kings, Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and Rudolph (a close family friend)—spread in its holiness across their lawn. The formerly triumphant Claus on the Meadowcrofts’ roof was now paltry in comparison.  

I was 10 when I finally convinced my father to dress up our front yard. On a cold December weekend, my father and I emerged from the garage, ladder and lights in hand, ready to decorate the forbidding front pines. Dad had just finished adorning two trees in a bold monochromatic blue, and was at the top of a third when the ladder tilted just enough to send him headlong into some nearby bushes. On the ground, obscured by pine needles and branches, he called to me, “Iris, get your mother!” While I looked for her in the solarium, my father dragged himself around to the front door.

Dad, a long time scoffer of doctors, was successfully able to treat nearly all the family’s illnesses and injuries with the application of a t-shirt. “Back pain? Roll up a t-shirt into a ball and lie down on it where it hurts till your spine’s readjusted. Flu? Wrap a t-shirt around your head to keep the heat in. Toothache? Sounds like you need a cold compress; go to the freezer and fetch some ice, wait, here’s a t-shirt!” Once inside the house, he set his own arm using a twig, an old Ace bandage, some leftover string from a box of cannolis, and a t-shirt arranged into a sling. Thus, with only two trees limply adorned, we entered the race. And as we presented no threat of competition, the neighbors deemed our display “cute.”

The following year my father was reluctant to climb the ladder, but at my insistence once again, we emerged from the garage together, without the ladder this time, but just a few strings of distinctly colored lights. I followed closely behind him, up the hill toward the front trees that we were daring to face again. After surveying the scene carefully, with a look of grave seriousness, my father began casting the strings of lights in random swirls against the canvas of trees that jutted up before us.  

The result was a kind of modernist design never before seen in Ibsen Court. The Meadowcrofts and Califanos had always been at pains to make their displays symmetrical, representational designs, whereas my father's work sprawled boldly across many trees, across the whole yard in wild curves and sharp turns, in splatters and squiggles, like one of Pollack's drip paintings.  

The Meadowcroft and Califano kids jeered, thought it ridiculous, nonsensical, offensive—that we’d made a mockery of Christmas lighting all together! But at the bus stop that Monday morning, when Amy Buchman came out of her house bundled in her snow clothes, and approached us all at the curb, she surprised everyone. To the Meadowcroft and the Califano kids’ consternation, Amy wiped her nose with the back of her mitten and said, “My parents and I really like your Christmas decorations, Iris. How does your father do it?”

My father continued with his abstract expressions for the rest of my childhood and through our neighborhood’s twilight years, the quiet that befalls suburbia when its youngest finally grow up. Every year there are fewer and fewer Trick or Treaters on Halloween, there are no more bicycles winding around the block, no more games of kickball in the court, and no school bus arriving in the morning because there is no one left to haul off to school.

With the last of the neighborhood kids grown up and moved away, Ibsen Court has become something of a ghost town. It’s not the place for tumbleweed, but if you look out one of the picture window, very rarely will you see any actual persons moving about. The lives of neighbors are only alluded to by the movement of cars, the flickering of lights within houses, the accumulation of garbage cans on the sidewalk on Monday mornings, a mailman stopping at each mailbox.

Communication between neighbors is almost completely halted. But without the children, the families hang back, and such conversations no longer take place. Yet on holidays, when all the kids return home, now as adults, the old war resumes. The neighbors compete by trafficking holiday visitors, piling cars in their driveways until they spill out all over the court. Also, the Califanos keep a snow mobile marooned on their front lawn. The Meadowcrofts have two flanking their porch. Next to their mailbox, the Califanos have stuck a festive sign reading, “Congratulations, Charlie, on your college graduation!” While the Meadowcrofts have trumped their accomplishment with their own sign next which reads, “Congratulations, Lydia on your engagement!” With these displays, posing as notices to arriving holiday guests, the competition reignites.

So, too, does the competition to mask our private disappointments. There are no signs that say, “Congratulations, Lawrence on your graduation from medical school—err your Chiropractic license!” “Congratulations, Amy on your out-of-wedlock pregnancy!” “Congratulations, Michelle on your hefty divorce settlement!”  “Congratulations, Iris on your escape from rehab!”

To gloss over all of this, Christmas cards are sent around featuring professional photos taken of the whole family. “Happy Holidays from the Meadowcrofts!” Alongside the parents and their grown children are in-laws and pets and new babies and new husbands and wives, whose smiling faces nearly crowd out the view of their gigantic Christmas tree behind them. But when next year’s card arrives a little more of the tree is visible, as without explanation the new husband or wife, the in-laws, are suddenly absent. Those remaining smile brightly. “I think Lydia might be divorced,” my mother says looking through the mail and spying the Califanos’ holiday greeting card. “I see her car parked out front all the time lately, but he’s never with her.”

And with each passing year, the decorations grow more elaborate. The visual spectacle must speak for itself, as we, the young critics, no longer meet curbside to appraise them. It is the North Pole at the Califano house this year, with elves of every size looking out into the street flashing plastic smiles next to candy canes sprouting like asparagus out from the lawn, so that their house appears more like a Christmas decoration sale than an actual home. The Meadowcrofts, recognizing the impossibility of countering them in amount, opt to compete instead in precision. They line the barren flowerbed, the front porch, the doorway; every angle of the house is accented in multi-colored lights!

My father, lamenting the defection of his kids into adulthood, lights one tree in memoriam, decorating it in his signature style. A few days before Christmas, he picks me up from the train station. On our drive home, after we pass the competing glares of the Califano and the Meadowcroft displays, which are surely visible by satellite, he says proudly, “Look at that tree!” Motioning to his modest display of white twinkling lights blinking out onto the court, he then challenges us to interpret its design. “I see a dragon, the beard of Zeus, and Freud’s cigar. No wait, it’s spaghetti!”

But before we get to Ibsen Court, I notice on some new neighbor’s lawn, in place of the old plastic Christmas character figurines, giant floats like you would see in a holiday parade have been anchored down by thick ropes. The house itself is barely visible. A monstrous inflated Santa Claus rocks back and forth in the wind as we pass. “Would it have killed them to decorate a little?” I say to my father and later on the kitchen mention my surprise at not having seen the same display in both Califano and Meadowcroft yards.  

“They had them!” my mother says bringing out some cups of coffee. “But they took them down.” These decorations, she tells me, sold out of stores so quickly, had disappeared from shelves faster than the Cabbage Patch Kids of my youth, that late in the night, they started to disappear from neighbors' lawns, too. They’d become much too valuable to be displayed.

Arriving at the end of this suburban arms race, the two super-neighbors negotiated a kind of disarmament, both agreeing to remove the air-filled floats from their lawns altogether. But deflated inside their garages and ever ready for display, the Meadowcrofts and the Califanos continue to harbor them. In the cold war of Christmas, these are their nuclear weapons. And with each passing year they will likely amass more, praying all the while, that the day should never come when they will be forced to deploy them.