Extreme holiday happiness
By Mike Fink
CNN Headline News
(CNN) -- OK -- You've finished your holiday shopping before Halloween, you've repeatedly listened to Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song" to the point it's not that funny anymore and you're starting to eat candy canes for dinner. There are only a few more weeks to indulge your thirst for holiday cheer. What do you do?
Fortunately, if you venture out further than the local mall, the holiday season manifests itself in some surprisingly festive ways.
In the song "If Every Day Was Like Christmas," Elvis asks, "Why can't every day be like Christmas?" The answer is, it can -- if you go to North Pole, Alaska.
According to the city's official theme it is "where the spirit of Christmas lives year round." Many streets bear holiday names, streetlights are decorated in candy cane motifs and many buildings are painted with Christmas colors and designs.
North Pole is also home to the "World's Largest Santa." This super-sized Santa is 48 feet tall, 33 feet wide and weighs about 600 pounds. He uses up 10 gallons of red paint, five of white and three gallons of black. Despite his size, this Santa has been around. He was originally built in Washington for the 1962 World's Fair and then was later used as a promotion gimmick. After being shipped to Anchorage for a few years, he was purchased by The Santa Claus House in North Pole.
"Giant Santa's" record-breaking holiday partner is "The World's Largest Stucco Snowman" in St. Paul, Minnesota. He stands at 54-feet and was built out of concrete stucco in 1974 by local Jaycees. According to roadsideamerica.com, he was moved at least once so that more people traveling along a nearby highway would be exposed to his "awesome splendor."
For reasons I don't completely understand, nutcrackers have a close association with Christmas. Arlene and George Wagner obviously have an intense abhorrence for nuts and have traveled far and wide collecting some 5,000 of these things. They are all on display in Leavenworth, Washington. Some of the nutcrackers date back 6,000 years.
Each year in New York City, prominent leaders of the Jewish community gather to celebrate Chanukah in a big way by lighting a 32-foot-tall golden menorah. The menorah features genuine oil lamps that are protected from the wind by glass chimneys and are lit by a rabbi lifted by way of a "cherry picker" crane.
If you can't travel, there's also plenty of holiday cheer on the Internet. Some fun sites include Claus.com, which bills itself as the "merriest site on the Internet."
The Jewish faith has been around for thousands of years, but virtual dreidels have only been around for the last dozen or so. To spin some try http://www.jewfaq.org/dreidel/
or html.wral.com/sh/idi/holidays/virtual-dreidel.
Finally there's NORAD's site: http://www.noradsanta.org/, where satellites that normally watch for missiles keep track of Santa as he follows his flight plan around the globe.
If you still can't get enough of the holidays, you might consider joining the select group of hardcore holiday enthusiasts who build huge light displays in their yard. I'm not talking about those who put up a string of lights, but rather those who create holiday roadside attractions that often outshine the average casino. If you're not sure if you belong in this group, you might want to head to www.planetchristmas.com/ShowingOff2003.htm to discover the entertaining standard for extreme holiday enthusiasm.
