Illuminations Tour

Too much fun. 1) I love trolleys 2) I love tours 3) I love happy people. This is a tour put together by volunteer tour guides (Somerville Arts Council) of christmas lights and decorations around Somerville! The trolley tries to make tight turns, the tour guides are making jokes, and everyone’s just excited to be there.
I love the carpenter’s house who adds one decoration to his set-​up a year. And the guy who dresses up as santa to wave out the door to the trolley… I’d been living in for Somerville for 2 years before I took this tour and this tour really brought Somerville to life for me. To hear the neighborly stories and tidbits… and go down some of the streets I’d never drive down myself.
Even if you can’t make it one year, at least pick up the self-​tour map so you can go check-​out the cool houses yourself until the following year! When we couldn’t make it one year, we picked up the map every year and will check out a couple every weekend.

At first it seems like a celebration of local quirk and kitsch, this 45 minute trolley tour of the side streets and neighborhoods of Somerville, showcasing the various incandescent manifestations of overzealous holiday enthusiasm.
But there’s also something a bit more ominous at work here. It’s like the Cold War never ended, just became condensed, localized, and about trying to out-​gaudy your neighbor, rather than blow them off the map. Or maybe it is about blowing stuff up — fuses, switch boxes, the power of an entire city.
Turning down certain streets, you realize that a sort of Hatfields and McCoys type turf battle is being waged, with Christmas lights as the bullets. Houses directly across from one another, annually upping the ante, trying to blot out each other even as they blot out the night sky with the wattage of a billions suns enveloping their homes.
In fact, are there even homes there, underneath the blinding riot of colored lights, plastic Santas, blowup Frosty’s and life sized Nativities? I don’t know. There are certain houses which bear more resemblance to the mothership at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, than anything built by man.
You owe it to yourself to do this once, at least. The tour guides will rattle you off mini-​bios of the main players, as well as the staggering amounts of their utility bills. There must be better ways you can spend a 1000 bucks in a month. Thereafter, just use the map they give you to do your own tour at a more leisurely pace, so you can truly gape in awe that these man made wonders of the world deserve.
N.b. Not to be confused with the Illuminati Tour, which departs from an undisclosed location, goes God knows where, and leaves you a babbling paranoid idiot at its conclusion