Christmas Light Display Rating System

On car trips, my wife Nancy and I enjoy playing games that involve watching for something or another and keeping a count. One game that we play in construction zones that have orange barrels with detachable bases is to keep track of the difference between the number of barrels and the number of bases. We start the count at zero, and add one for every base we see without a barrel, and subtract one for each barrel we see without a base. Usually, the count runs positive until the end of the construction zone, at which point we see the scattered barrels that were dragged by trucks and detached somewhere at the end of the construction zone. The final count is negative more often than not, indicating that there were more total barrels visible than bases. (I.e., some of the barrels had been replaced.)

We had talked for a while about ideas for a game for rating Christmas light displays. We needed a reasonably universal rating system, that was consistent from house-to-house, and that could be applied while driving by. After a few tries, we've finally settled on a ten-point rating system that's similar to the APGAR system for rating the health of newborn babies based on the presence or absence of ten different characteristics (such as breathing, presence of a heartbeat, etc.) As a result, we've nicknamed our Christmas Light Display Rating System the "AckBarf" scale.

Score one point for each of the following:

• lights: any lights visible at all
• house: lights on the outside of the house (including the eaves), but not the roof. (That's a separate point.)
• yard: lights anywhere in the yard
• colors: more than one color of lights
• blinking: blinking/flashing lights of any type (including "dripping icicles")
• IPOs: Illuminated Plastic Objects (inflatable or hard plastic translucent but non-transparent objects with lights inside them)
• roof: anything illuminated (lights, IPOs, etc.) on the roof
• multiple:^[1] more than one kind of blinking lights, both kinds of IPOs, or getting the "bonus point" in multiple ways
• coverage: at least 75% of all available spaces/surfaces decorated and/or brighter than the street lights when seen from down the street.
• "bonus point:" moving displays, projected images (including the "green measles" that are popular in 2017 & 2018), tracer lights, sound, or noticeably poor execution (e.g.,> icicles on the house with only one strand blinking because the person forgot to swap out the special bulb that makes that particular strand blink).

The Results:

• 1-3: classy, or at least tasteful. For example, a house with a single white candle in each window gets a "1".
• 4-6: average to a little gaudy. A house with multicolored strands ("lights" & "color") on the outside of the ("house") house and in the bushes ("yard") gets a 4. The same house with blinking lights gets a 5 ("blink"). Add a lit-up plastic Santa ("IPO") and you've got a 6.
• 7-8: That house. You know the one; everybody talks about it under their breath whenever they drive past it.
• 9-10: must be experienced in person. The house is a landmark when neighbors give directions to holiday parties in the neighborhood, and is probably also the cause of some minor (or not-so-minor) local traffic jams.

Quick scoring:

Nancy and I generally start from a base score of "4", assuming multicolored lights on the house and in the yard. That way, we can subtract points if the display is in only one color, or if there are lights on the house but not in the yard (or vice-versa). Similarly, we can add points for blinking, "IPOs", brightness/coverage (usually obvious from up the street), and the bonus point.

Copyright © 2000-2006 by Jeff Bigler and Nancy Gilman. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

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Last modified: Thu Dec 20 10:43:06 2018 by Jeff Bigler.