Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 28, 2001
MEADOW POINTE -- You've heard of having a holly, jolly Christmas? Well, Carin Bicker is having a tacky, wacky Christmas.
She has only her next door neighbor and friend, Diane Loney, to blame.
Hoping to cheer up Bicker after a stressful year, Loney has erected a changing display on Bicker's porch loaded with oddball twists on the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas.
Loney said it started with a touch of class and dignity. About two weeks ago, she placed a bird ornament atop an elegant tree on her friend's porch to represent "a partridge in a pear tree." Equally tasteful were the "two turtle doves."
It was when she reached "three French hens" that things started to get deliberately loopy.
Bicker awoke one morning to find three rubber chickens hanging from the tree. Each neck was wrapped in a frilly French lace collar. The birds' heads were crowned with champagne glasses -- as in French.
"I have this beautiful door with beautiful wreaths and I've got three dead chickens drinking champagne on my porch," Bicker said with a laugh.
The next day brought "four calling birds." Loney rigged four plastic pink flamingos with mobile phones and beepers.
The "five golden rings" were plastic glow-in-the-dark hoops. Six geese-a-laying were little plastic birds glued to tops of eggs. Seven ceramic swans ringing a miniature life jacket stood in for "seven swans-a-swimming"
To represent eight maids-a-milking, Loney glued eight dolls' heads to a wooden cow. The greatest shock came with the "nine ladies dancing." Loney phoned Bicker and asked her to follow a trail of ballerina dolls she'd spaced out along Bicker's sidewalk.
When Bicker reached the eighth doll at the edge of her driveway, Loney leaped out from behind her fence wearing a pink and white tutu and a crown.
"I was truly speechless," Bicker recalls upon seeing the 48-year-old mother of grown children pirouetting on her driveway. "You should have captured my face when she came out of the gate."
When she woke up Friday, "10 pipers piping" were on her porch: toy soldier cutouts blowing New Year's Eve party horns.
The two women had been friends for more than 10 years, first in Ocean County, N.J., and for the past five years in Meadow Pointe.
What united them at first was the disease that afflicted both of their husbands: multiple sclerosis. Bicker's husband, Chuck, died from complications of the disease last year. Loney's husband, Michael, uses a wheelchair.
"We've been wonderful friends. We've helped each other through many rough times: our husbands' illness, raising teenagers," Loney said.
A lot of that "help" consists of joking around. A sign in Bicker's front yard reads, "Free weeds: Pull your own." Last week, she joked about hanging giant photos of Loney in her tutu on the street.
Bicker said she'll miss the daily surprises on her porch once Christmas is over. "I don't think anything can top this," she said.
Loney said this won't be the last of the practical jokes between the friends.
"If you can't have fun, you should just chuck it all," she said.