Christmas House Tour

My new friend, Chris, invited me to accompany her on a tour of houses decorated for Christmas in her upscale gated community near here. I leaped at the chance, being the nosy person I am. I have driven by this development thousands of times as I make the commute from our ranch into St. Petersburg. It's a golfing community but I never breached the gates since I do not golf.
I met Chris in a quilting class in our little town. She was clearly the most accomplished quilter and artist in our midst. One day we decided to have lunch together in a little shop next door. She was an Obama supporter, a rare bird in this place. She's lovely, thoughtful, community minded.
So I was glad to be invited on the Christmas house tour.
I arrived at the Club House, after signing myself in at the entrance to be official. Chris was waiting and we began the tour. We were to go to six places and it seemed they were identical. There were several models of houses (the Tradewinds, the Naples, etc.) While we are tooling from place to place I am trying to figure out who Chris is! Clearly, she's not a person who decorates her house with plastic accessories in every nook and cranny. Her house was not on the tour but we went by it (fast).
After seeing these houses I was left with a feeling of sad creepiness. Who are these people who have such perfect homes, recently purchased, that not a stray pubic hair could be found in the entire place? They obviously must ingest food, yet there was not a hint of anything edible or tracks of food on anything.
A theme of the tour was that every couple seemed to have some collection. In one house there were tiny lit up ceramic houses, salt and pepper shakers in another, really dreadful fashion sculptures in another. My favorite was the golf balls with applied glitter, or maybe it was the Christmas tree decorations made from shells with applied stickers. I loved this! I loved talking to these devoted couples who wore complimentary outfits. They were all recent occupants of these amazing houses. They had been police chiefs in Long Island towns, military men (I thought I would have to restrain Chris when she wanted to go on about her brothers in Iraq), CPA's, and whatever. But, now they were proud to live in this incredibly sterile and squeaky clean place, now decorated in overwrought Christmas.
There were some great surprises. One couple had some really nice paintings. Another couple had a really old mother carefully placed on a couch. I talked to her as the tour was taking a spin in yet another opulent bathroom. She looked stunned to be here and told me about her origins in Ireland.
In some strange way, I really connected with these people who are proud of where they have landed. They speak of how much they love their new community and their neighbors. To be retired is scrappy. You've got to figure out what to do with all these empty days. You can play golf. It looked to me like the women had a better grip on their lives. After all they had quickly decorated their homes for the Tour. The men had "offices" in their opulent homes that were maybe reminiscent of the offices they left when they retired. Everything now paper and dust free, maybe purpose-free as well. There were no books anywhere to be found but huge t.v.'s everywhere.
The bathrooms! All the couples were so proud of these,( we dutifully inspected them all), large enough for a square dance, and enough of them to service a posse of women with bladder disfunction.
Who are these people, my fellow Americans? Where are their compost piles?
Anyway, I loved doing this. Fodder for the mind. My new friend, Chris, has a lot of moxie to invite such an eccentric as me to go with her.
My grandson, Diego, has a lovely on line art exhibit. Go to tampabay.com/nie and click next to the XpressPluggedIn logo.
The photo above is my house, no connection to the Christmas house tour. We actually have a Christmas tree, in a pot, so we can plant it later. Not fake, and it has decorations made by a four year old.
I am so blessed, though idiosyncratic and certainly peculiar!