▸ Column · Modern suburban America, X-Men age — a residential block where holiday lawn displays are the arena and the arrival of a forty-foot inflatable Santa is an opening gambit
JUGGERNAUT replies.
Replied to by Juggernaut, with a rebuttal from Wolverine.
The letter
For eleven Decembers I've had the best holiday display on the block — precision-timed lights, a hand-crafted nativity, a wire reindeer I repose each season. This year a new neighbor, Bartosz, put up a forty-foot inflatable Santa that buries my whole yard in shadow; at night his thing glows so bright my lights just look washed out. I raised it politely. He patted the Santa's boot and told me competition is healthy. I've been researching a sixty-foot inflatable and a wind machine, but my husband says that's how you end up on the local news. So: do I escalate and outbuild him, or take the high road — which in this case means going out there after dark and physically deflating his setup?
Juggernaut replies
Sixty feet? That's your CEILING? You haven't even broken ground and you're already too small.
Here's what your husband doesn't understand, and what Bartosz clearly hasn't figured out: you don't take the high road when someone parks a forty-foot monument in front of your life's work and calls it "competition." The high road is just standing still in nice shoes. I know what that shadow feels like — I grew up in a house where Charles Xavier was the gold standard at every dinner table, every report card, every "yes, Cain, very nice, but have you SEEN what Charles is doing?" You know what the high road got me? Smaller. The shadow grows because you keep giving it room.
The midnight deflation scheme — forget it. You sneak out at two in the morning and let the air out, you didn't go THROUGH Bartosz, you went AROUND him. That's not a win, that's a detour dressed up like one. Come morning you're still living under forty feet of inflatable Santa, except now you're sneaky about it on top of everything else.
You want your display back? Seventy feet. Two wind machines. And when Bartosz starts pricing something taller, you'd better already be at the hardware store.
Walls don't shrink on their own. You go THROUGH them.
Stop standing there. Start building.
— Juggernaut
Wolverine weighs in
Big man says go through, not around. On the midnight deflation scheme, he's right — don't. But not in some clean moral way. I've done things in the dark for reasons that felt righteous at the time, and I've had a century to sit with them. The morning after always lasts longer than the night before.
Here's what Cain didn't say. Eleven years you built something real. Bartosz shows up and suddenly it's a foot-race? Your display is gone either way the second you're only building it for him. If the sixty-foot Frosty's going up for YOU — for what those eleven years meant before he showed up — fine. If it's going up for Bartosz, you already lost the only thing that mattered.
— Wolverine
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