Happy end of Inflatable Lawn Ornament season, for those who celebrate! Please now put Frosty the Blowman away, forever.
If you think I sound more like a get-off-my-lawn Grinch than a scale-your-chimney Santa, fair point. But I gave you space to go a little crazy over the holidays. Maybe you can channel a little holiday spirit and hear me out?
Because this crazy excuse for a winter is a signal flare from whatever you hold sacred that it’s time to push back against our worst consumer instincts. And disposable culture like inflatable lawn ornaments just fans the climate fires.
A 12 foot Santa sucks energy with the whining persistence of an asthmatic dust buster, sending carbon pollution straight into the warming void. And by now we’ve all experienced enough cheap consumer electronics to know it won’t be long before Santa becomes a bundle of plastic pollution and e-waste.
This year was tough, with Halloween inflatables unfurling in August. The nylon facsimiles of Thanksgiving were inedible. Then, in December, a feel-good story broke where I live in Madison, Wisconsin: a cheerful army of 12 feet tall inflatable Santas was lining a nearby street.
Meanwhile, the weather got freakier. It rained in Vermont on Christmas and there was barely any snow on the ground in Wisconsin. In late January we learned that winter tourism in the Upper Midwest was dead for the year, shuttered in the hope of next winter. Sap in sugar maples up north was already running. From Minnesota came report of a garter snake in January.
On February 2, when Jimmy the Groundhog said that spring would be early, who didn’t think: DUH! 2023 was the warmest in 125,000 years. Of course spring will be early. It’s not Jimmy’s fault. He was probably losing his mind in January, like anyone who skates or skis or likes it on the cool side.
We obviously have a hard time talking about this stuff. I mean, how are we supposed to wrap our heads around Wisconsin’s first February tornado?
As a conversational aid, I nominate inflatable lawn ornaments as a symbolic windmill, our piñata of overconsumption. Not much fruit hangs lower than these blasphemously ugly invaders from across the uncanny valley, so go ahead and take a swing.
Let’s collectively resolve to never buy another inflatable lawn ornament. Let the market nudge those manufacturers towards making respirators and tents for refugees.
Truth: instantaneous, 100% compliance with retiring inflatable lawn ornaments won’t solve climate change. Driving to grandma’s house for Christmas dinner may have a more significant carbon footprint. But climate breakdown is here to stay. And one way to buy ourselves some time for this hobbled Earthship is to rein in some of our more ridiculously consumptive habits.
Any change in behavior needs some practice, and do we ever need to practice. A campaign against inflatable lawn ornaments has the potential to be both amusing and victimless. With so little at stake, we can work out some decarbonizing kinks on the way to some kind of working consensus.
But Santa’s Army really worries me. In the progressive city where I live, climate change is widely understood as a complex reality. More than 20 years ago Santa’s neighborhood was so ecologically minded that it pioneered the use of rain gardens to help restore local springs that feed a nearby lake.
What’s crazier is learning that even the people who organized Santa’s Army hate inflatable lawn ornaments. “It’s ironic because all of us actually despise inflatables and find them unbelievably tacky,” an organizer told a TV reporter. “But for some reason when you put them all together and they match and they’re oversized, it goes from tacky to just really fun, in theory.”
Maybe? But putting them all together definitely multiplies environmental impact. And the season keeps lengthening: I’ve already seen a leprechaun and a dinosaur holding an egg.
We’re on the verge of an inflatable arms race, and we’ve probably already lost a few suburbs. If we’re not careful someone will soon be reimagining the 2007 Christmas movie Deck the Halls, where one homeowner decides he wants his lighting display to be seen from space. Only with inflatables.
I too find joy in tacky goofiness and holiday spirit, but singing songs and sharing sweets seems more wholesome than taunting the ghost of holiday futures.
That ghost will soon have us making hard choices due to climate disruption. Millions of people already are. You or someone you love is going to want that tent or need that respirator. Or just really miss winter.
Building a snowman shouldn’t require an extension cord.
Save snow. Ditch the blow.
