One of my favorite parts of Christmas is driving around to look at lights people put up to celebrate. After living in a high-rise building for the last few years, we’ve not had an outside front door or place to hang lights. So this year we changed that.
We have some lights and a small tree shining in front of our house. It’s not much but it makes me smile when I come home and see its warm light. Our artificial Christmas tree will stay up until February or March. I think it made it to spring last year.
This year, no one else in our townhouses put up anything more than a wreath. The neighbors in our community hung some lights and it was nice to see. But overall, there was nothing up.
A couple of nights we drove around and didn’t see any lights anywhere near us. There was one house near us that had some major decorations. But most people didn’t put up any lights at all.
So we did what any sane couple would do. We drove two hours South to Richmond, Virginia and the Tacky Lights Tour. This has been an ongoing listing of tackily lit houses for 26 years in Richmond.
I knew we only had one evening to do this so I wanted to get the most out of our trip. Being the nerd I am, I turned to Casey Liss’ Tacky Lights Navigator.
I took his original list and looks at a map view of the houses and listed them from North to South and we made our way through them.
It was a great night and we had a blast. Most of the houses were amazing. We caught a few unlisted houses and some of the ones on the list weren’t participating this year.
We saw about 30 hours in the 5-ish hours we drove around. Below are a few of the photos we took along the way. They don’t do any of the houses justice, but I hope you enjoy a bit of Christmas cheer in this new year. Click them to see the full-size version.