One year, a neighbor who decorated her house in white lights found the flashing, colored Christmas lights I’d strung on my iron security bars a bit much, and she wondered if I could replace them with something more tasteful. I was only half-joking when I told her Christmas isn’t about good taste, and all manifestations of exuberant celebration beyond the bounds of taste win my holiday approval. Not surprisingly, I’ve always loved Al Copeland’s Christmas lights display at 5001 Folse (where Transcontinental meets the lake). It’s too much cubed, with the palm trees in the yard wrapped with colored rope lights, a lit up Santa and his reindeer taking flight in front of the house, and a 30 or so foot lit Christmas tree all on the lawn. And a Nativity, of course, but nobody in it lights up.

Saturday night, 50 or so people gathered in the rain to watch Copeland’s family turn on the lights for the final time. Copeland died this year of Merkel Cell Carcinoma, so “This is a year of remembrance,” Al Copeland, Jr. announced at the lighting ceremony. Next year, the lights will move to Lafreniere Park as was planned before Hurricane Katrina. As much as visiting his lights was a part of so many people’s Christmas, they were never popular with the neighbors, what with the amount of light they generate and the traffic as cars lineup to slowly troll by. It’s hard to imagine how they’ll have the same impact, though. Part of the beauty of them is the raw density of the display; spread them out for a Celebration in the Oaks-type display and they’ll almost seem tasteful.

If you go to see them, park nearby and walk up because you miss too much from the car. Last night my wife spotted nine cherubs with different looks and ages on the front wall and speculated that there’s one for each of the Copeland children or grandchildren (Copeland, Jr. mentioned nine kids in his comments. I thought he was talking about Al’s kids, but there were nine young ones who helped push down the plunger to turn on the lights.). If you don’t get out, you miss the story of Copeland’s history with Christmas under a photo of him surrounded by holly leaves. You miss the Popeyes helicopter and jet flying in a front window. In short, you miss a whole dimension of the too much-ness if you try to see it from your car.

Shortly before the lighting ceremony, friends and family who were at the house for the lighting party came around to the street in front of the house. One of the highlights of my tenure at Gambit was the year I was given Gambit‘s invitation not to the lighting party but Copeland’s Christmas party. I remember seeing Marlin Gusman there, and I suspected that if I knew Jefferson Parish politics better, I’d recognize most of the significant players at the party. Like the light show outside, there were some extreme examples of dubious taste inside – a lot of unconvincing hairpieces and some unfortunately obvious boob jobs, one most memorably on a woman for whom her chest was a quarter to a third of her overall weight. It was surreal, extreme and brilliantly entertaining, and the perfect strangeness started when we walked in the door. Copeland and his wife were greeting guests at the door, and I was at the end of the a short line behind two couples of women and my wife. As they walked in, Copeland gave each a lei to go with the Christmas party’s Hawaiian theme. When I got to him, I introduced myself, and he said, “I don’t do guys” and shuffled me off to the cadre of young hula girls standing beside the chair in which his then-pregnant wife was sitting. I couldn’t have asked for a more entertaining Al Copeland memory.