Holiday decorations? Bring them on

I was 10 years old in 1965, the first time my Uncle Frank took me, my brother and our cousins on a field trip from Rosedale (Queens) to Canarsie (Brooklyn) to look at a house that was so lavishly decorated for Christmas that the Daily News wrote a story about it.

As time went on, other homeowners were similarly inspired to spend lavishly on their outdoor holiday-scapes —  and our thrilling Christmastime drive-by tours became an annual tradition.

“Let’s go look at the lights!”

As we got older, one car was no longer large enough, so we drove out in two to see the life-size manger scenes, giant plastic carolers, blowup Santas, painted plywood sleighs and all those sparkling lights.

In the 1980s, inspired by those excursions, I wrote a play about a dysfunctional Italian family, mourning the loss of its beloved patriarch, who routinely took his kids to see “The Lights on Walden Court.”

(People said my play made them feel good. According to psychiatrists, decorations do, too, by raising our levels of dopamine, the “feel-good” hormone. For kids, decorations inspire wonder. For their parents, all those lights and Santas evoke warm memories.)

Although my father decorated every year, he never went over the top. He didn’t have the energy or the resources. But he did run some lights around the windows in front of the house.

We also had two large silver bells in the window. (They were actually pale-pink bells, covered in silver glitter.) One year, he also hooked up some outdoor speakers and played Christmas carols for two hours every night. Passersby loved it.

My friend Eddie’s father was more ambitious when he decided to run lights across the roof of their two-story house. He set up a rickety old ladder and had a very nervous Eddie climb up with a hammer, nails and the lights while his father directed the action from good old terra firma.

I was too jittery to help. Just looking at Eddie traverse the roof made me dizzy.

I think being up there made him dizzy, too.

At one point he screamed down, “Aren’t you going to be ashamed to tell people how your son died?”

As an adult, I lived in apartments until my early 40s, so I only had to worry about inside decorations.

For this reason, I was completely unprepared for the peer pressure I experienced in 1998.

This is when I had finally bought my first home, a small non-mansion, built around 1890. It was covered with gray siding, had 20 gray steps going up to its front door, and was surrounded by dark, ominous trees.

Decorating it for Christmas never entered my mind until the first week in December, when my neighbors began festooning their homes with twinkle lights, plastic carolers and reindeer the size of water buffaloes.

As one friend was kind enough to tell me: “Every house on the block is decorated! Except yours!”

Yeah, yeah.

This was sad, but true.

Motorists drove down my street and found themselves in a glittering winter wonderland — until they passed by my place, which looked like the Bates house in “Psycho.”

I briefly considered putting up a few strings of lights, but how long was that going to take?

I bought a wreath, instead, and hung it from a nail on the front door.

Fortunately, the nail was already there, or I probably would have just left it on the top step.

(I’ve since come to believe that there is a holiday decorating gene that I simply do not have.)

The following year, I spent Thanksgiving with friends in Florida. And even though it was only about 79 degrees outside — that’s freezing to Floridians — I took every opportunity to catch some rays on their south-facing front lawn.

At one point, I noticed that neighbors were putting up Christmas decorations, which struck me as funny, since I was lying outside in a bathing suit.

Directly across the street, the homeowners were stringing colored lights around a palm tree — hilarious — and setting up a large wooden sleigh with reindeer, which had to be secured to stakes in the lawn as well as the palm tree, to keep from falling over.

About 10 minutes later, I went inside to get an iced tea — it was around 82 degrees by then — and got back onto my chaise. By this point, speakers had been hooked up and carols were blaring down the block.

This was a first for me. I had never been in Florida at this particular time of year. I found it kind of cute, though.

I took a long sip of my iced tea and slathered on some more Coppertone, just as I began to hear Bing Crosby sing, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…”

I smiled, lay back down and thought, “Keep dreaming, Bing…”

It filled me with holiday spirit, though. And, nowadays, I take it wherever I can get it.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Ervolino: Even just a little holiday decoration can lift your spirits