Keeping up with the Joneses can be tough—especially when the Joneses have a house decked with 40,000 ornamental lights that blink in sync with Ozzy Osbourne, or a front yard mobbed with inflatable snowmen, or a roadside nativity scene that dwarfs Mary and Joseph’s accommodations in Bethlehem.
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Keeping up with the Joneses can be tough—especially when the Joneses have a house decked with 40,000 ornamental lights that blink in sync with Ozzy Osbourne, or a front yard mobbed with inflatable snowmen, or a roadside nativity scene that dwarfs Mary and Joseph’s accommodations in Bethlehem.
But people in at least some American communities do, indeed, scope out their neighbors when it comes to determining the scale of their Christmas or Chanukah displays, suggests an unusual line of studies based on observations of homes in several states.
How and where people take their holiday-decorating cues appears to vary by community. Residents of Parma, Ohio, for example, seem focused on not being outdone by the folks next door. In Daphne, Alabama, people seem much less influenced by their immediate neighbors than by others on the block. In Swansea, Illinois, living next to someone with an impressive display appears to leave people less likely to decorate their own homes—perhaps because they are worried about the subdivision looking gaudy, or have decided they can sit back, stay warm, and bask in their neighbor’s glow.
Heading up the research is the husband-and-wife team of Robert K. Shelly, an emeritus professor of sociology at Ohio University, and Ann Converse Shelly, a professor of education at Ashland University. The two recruited volunteers around the nation to tour neighborhoods to make field observations. In their most recent study, Donald J. Lacombe, an associate professor of economics at West Virginia University, helped them crunch the numbers and adapt the neighborhood-mapping techniques used by economists who study housing values.
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The Shellys got in the spirit to undertake such research six Decembers ago, while driving through rural Ohio. They noticed that different communities took very different approaches to holiday decoration, and began wondering how much of a role competition and factors such as class played in people’s decisions to display giant menorahs or risk life and limb to mount a plastic Santa Claus on their roof. They began collecting data themselves in 2006, and in the following years used American Sociological Association email lists to recruit volunteers—mainly graduate students—to help. So far, their studies have examined more than 2,200 homes.
To try to ensure uniformity of judging, the couple developed a coding system. On one end of its four-category scale were the just over one-fourth of homes that had no decorations at all. Homes were classified as “minimal” in decoration if they had, for example, a wreath on the door and maybe a few strings of lights. Having a lawn display with a set of figures, or lights hung around more than one architectural feature, earned a home a “moderate” designation. Among homes scored as “elaborate” were those with many illuminated figures on their lawn.
Folded into the “elaborate” category were a small number of houses—about 4 percent of those studied—with displays deliberately constructed to be over-the-top. Clark W. Griswold, Chevy Chase’s character in the movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, appears to have inspired many such efforts. The Shellys encountered one display, decorated to mimic the Griswolds’, that had 100,000 decorative bulbs.
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The researchers restricted their analysis to working-class, middle-class, and upper-middle class neighborhoods. They skipped lower-class neighborhoods, where many people live in multi-unit dwellings and lack their own yards, and upper-class households, which were rare in the communities studied and increasingly hire companies to do their holiday decorating for them.
The studies found that people in middle and upper-middle class homes were more likely than those in working-class homes to have low or moderate levels of decoration. But, when it came to high levels of decoration, working-class homes were every bit as likely as upper-middle-class homes to put on a big show. It’s the middle class that kept things toned down.
The Shellys acknowledge that they have yet to take into account considerations like religion and ethnicity, which might explain or undermine their findings. Determined to flesh out their data, they hit the streets of Columbus this week for yet another round of observations. Area residents who spot the couple driving slowly past their homes can take comfort in knowing the two aren’t casing the joint, just thinking about expressive cues, ordinal measures, probit models, and the theories of Pierre Bourdieu.
Mr. Shelly says he and his wife decorate their own home for Christmas, but their display is “relatively modest,” consisting of “a couple strings of lights in the bushes.” Although they have presented their research at American Sociological Association conferences, he readily admits it has “a certain tongue-in-cheek quality.” Taking it too seriously, he says, might detract from the merriment of it all.
Peter Schmidt was a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He covered affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. He is a co-author of The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America (The New Press, 2020).