The Trans-Siberian Orchestra has at least one suburban compatriot

Ah, Christmas. Nothing quite brings out the bad taste in people like the Yuletide.

There are two manifestations of this type of bad taste: music and lights. Christmas music is almost uniformly bad. With the exception of maybe Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown soundtrack, most Christmas music is about either sap or pomp. Most of it is sickeningly sweet ("Chestnuts Roasting O'er an Open Fire," "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "White Christmas," etc., "White Christmas" made even worse by the fact it was written by Irving Berlin, probably the most famous Jewish songwriter of all time), and the rest of it is absurdly bombastic ("God Rest ye Merry Gentlemen," "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," and most of the more Christian songs).

The lighting is a spectacle of itself these days, an hilarious trademark of suburban culture, and as with the music, the more money one has to spend on lighting one's home, the further it drifts from the boundaries of good taste.

Which brings me to this:



You may have seen this before, because it's a couple years old. If you haven't, trust me, it's real. Here's the full story.

Here's the thing with bad taste: if your bad taste is strong enough, if you execute it with enough steadfast conviction, your bad taste ceases to be a negative factor. It becomes something akin to the music of, say, Queen: it is completely ridiculous, it is completely over the top, but that's exactly the point, and it is awesome.

And, in short, that's what we're witnessing with this video. After all, there's nothing more ridiculous than the music of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which takes everything ridiculous about Christmas and Queen and adds a dash of unselfconscious pretension to top it off. Combining it with a bombastic light show that's coordinated with the music is the type of absurd and brilliant touch that can push something over the edge that separates "stupid" and "amazing."

Or perhaps it doesn't separate the two as much as join them.