Saturday, December 25, 2010
Christmas in Connecticut
From the Wall Street Journal:
Hedge fund titan Paul Tudor Jones III spreads a little Christmas cheer around Greenwich, Conn., each year. Well maybe more than just a little.
Off-duty police officers direct traffic around the sprawling light display, allowing drivers to line up eight at a time in front of Jones’ 13,000-square-foot home on a waterfront cul-de-sac. A soundtrack synchronized to the thousands of flashing lights plays over the radio on FM90.5. The full cycle lasts nearly five minutes.
There is no official count of the spectators, but on the night The Journal attended scores of cars lined up along the streets of the quiet neighborhood for a chance to take in a light show put on by one of the richest people in the world. (WSJ was the only media organization allowed to film this year’s over-the-top show). This year’s theme: angels.
3 comments:
Gaudy but nice! You could probably see this from the gold coast of LI!
Nice theme, I wondered what happened to the angel fad.
betcha they all fled Queens.
[In answer to the question of whether it is appropriate for an atheist to celebrate Christmas:]
Yes, of course. A national holiday, in this country, cannot have an exclusively religious meaning. The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: “Merry Christmas”—not “Weep and Repent.” And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance . . . .
The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only “commercial greed” could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.
- AYN RAND, The Objectivist Calendar, Dec. 1976
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