Curse the crass commercialisation of Christmas

Every year, the good citizens of Wareemba (which is a suburb I have never heard of, even though I cycle through it several times a week) appear to hold a competition to see who can drown the most polar bears by lighting up their houses in a way reminiscent of what Perth did when John Glenn flew over back in 1962. If there is a space shuttle orbiting at the moment, I'm sure the astronauts will be looking back at earth and going, "Look, that's Wareemba!"



I took some photos of this place in daylight the other day. It certainly looks better at night, and draws one hell of a crowd. The only thing missing last night was a couple of Plod doing crowd and traffic control.

That aside, the lights are pretty good. Monkey was completely entranced and spent all his time running this way and that pointing out his favourites, which changed every time he saw a new illuminated Santa.



The wiggly lights in the bottom left are two cyclists riding past with their lights on.



A different sort of Santa.



Another view of funny trees.



This is where the commercialisation comes from. The ubiquitous icecream van. Junior spotted it as soon as we arrived, nicked some coins out of the ashtray and was in the queue like a shot.

I hate the icecream these vans sell. If I had a business raising maggots for fishermen, I wouldn't feed it to the blowflies.



There was not one icecream van - there were two. Bleagh.



This is what really ticked me off. We drove around the corner as we were leaving and there was a high quality gellato truck, and the queue of cars was such that I couldn't stop and get some. I am really, really annoyed that this mob were not crass enough to park near the christmas lights houses so that I could have had some gellato. As they say, the important thing is location, location, location. If you are going to commercialise something, at least sell it near where your buyers are located.