[COOL OR NOT COOL] Turning your house into a Winter Wonderland

My mother was not a Kool-Aid mom, greeting me at the door after school with a tray of wholesome snacks, or welcoming the neighborhood kids over for slumber parties and rice krispie squares. 

She's not overly sentimental, and her attitude when I was growing up was, decidedly, "do it yourself." 

All of this is fine—it made me independent and self-sufficient and blahblahblah rationalization—BUT, it makes it very confusing when Christmas time rolls around and she suddenly transforms into Mrs. Claus. 

Our kitchen—the one that she barely uses the other 11 months of the year—is turned into a 24-hour cookie-baking factory.  All of the door knobs in the house are adorned with plush Rudolph faces which makes it fucking IMPOSSIBLE to enter or exit a room.  Every flat surface is covered with cotton and other forms of fake snow.  It is a straight-up, motherfucking winter wonderland in there, and it's CRAZY.

Here are the most frightening examples:

On the top, we have two 4-feet tall animatronic dolls. The boy looks like a Chucky clone and when plugged in, his arms move up and down like Frankenstein. He's supposed to be decorating a tree, I guess.

The girl is no better, as she looks like the small child of a member of the Russian mob. When she's plugged in, she sways slowly from side to side, as her long-lashed eyes open and close. What's worse is that the eyes don't open and close in sync, so she looks like she's having a seizure, all while rocking from side to side.

Along the bottom, we see just two of the FIFTEEN creepy caroler dolls, that are all over the house. According to my mother, they are "worth a fortune."  My brother, who keeps old McDonald's toys for their "sentimental value," claims that he will keep these dolls and display them proudly in his home. Surely, he'll have them put in his casket and be buried with them.

On the other hand, I don't want these creepers in my house and will likely sell them to some other old lady or pedophile. Sorry, Mom. These statues look like either Munch's Screamer or a bunch of haggard homeless people getting ready to give someone a blow job. Am I wrong here?

I suppose living in a certifiable gingerbread house for one month out of the year, every year for 22 years, has an effect on you.  All I want are some lights.  That's it.  Just some lights.  I don't even want a tree. 

So, after sharing some very personal holiday decorating secrets with you, it's only natural that you need to give something up. 

So what's your holiday decorating jam?  Are you minimalist because you were scarred as a child?  Do you do it up like crazy?

Mrs. Claus wants to know.