Bob Dylan’s Neighbor Spent Years Analyzing His Half-Hearted, Sloppy Christmas Light Displays
Over the years, Bob Dylan has received a lot of attention for the Christmas lights outside his home, though not for a particularly good reason. A neighbor watched every year as Dylan’s home featured messy and often confounding light displays. She attempted to analyze the decorations.
Bob Dylan has notoriously confusing displays of Christmas lights
Author Merrill Markoe has lived near Dylan’s Malibu home for years. In an article for Vice, she wrote that in December, each house in their neighborhood “looks more or less like an outdoor restaurant courtyard at a four-star hotel. The decorating style is consistent because many of the residents hire the same company to wrap their trees and shrubbery for them.” All except Dylan’s, that is.
Markoe first noticed his holiday decorations in 2008, when there was “a small, decidedly uneven, single strand of Christmas lights” on the hedge in front of his home. Though she said the lights looked as though someone haphazardly tossed them onto the hedge, she set to work comedically analyzing them.
In 2010, Markoe came to the conclusion that the lights “mirrored the monthly underemployment levels in the US.” In 2013, Dylan added a second strand of lights, which Markoe believed was evidence that he’d had a good year.
“Year after year, his annual dispatch in lights was comforting in its consistency while remaining surprising,” she wrote. “Not unlike his songs.”
His display improved in 2018
In 2018, Markoe was surprised to see that Dylan had decorated at all. Wildfires damaged many homes in Malibu. While the fire did not harm his home, it did destroy the hedge out front. Despite this, he decorated.
“There, between two never-before-seen plaster angels, sat a brightly colored inflatable manger scene! I gasped,” she wrote in her 2018 analysis for Vice. “It was every bit as radical a departure for Bob as his most legendary one in 1965 at The Newport Folk Festival when he caused such an uproar because he ‘went electric.’“
Before Markoe could attempt to analyze the meaning of the new kind of display, Dylan took them down. Soon, there was a new string of lights in its place. This year, though, the lights were neatly arranged.
“What an unexpected turn of events!” she wrote. “After a full decade of seemingly improvisational, almost haphazard looking lighting tableaus, here now was a design as fluid with symmetry as it was conversant in the language of negative space.”
Markoe believed she had an explanation for the newly neat-looking display.
“With this new, more classically arranged format, Bob is reminding us that the true spirit of Christmas right now can best be found in a return, for our country, to the classic values of democracy to which it used to aspire.”
Bob Dylan released a Christmas album
Though Dylan’s light displays may not be very festive, he showed his holiday spirit with a Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart. Dylan released the album in 2009. All domestic proceeds for the song went to Feeding America, a non-profit organization dedicated to hunger relief.
On the album, Dylan covered a number of classic Christmas songs, including “Winter Wonderland,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and “Silver Bells.”
