Last night some a-holes trashed my outside decorations. I have two small daughters (three and five) and I put some inflatables outside, snowflakes, presents, and a few other things. dh came home this morning to find them strewn throughout the neighborhood.

I was 'fine' with it in the morning, but here I am at 5 am, unable to sleep, thinking I should be up all night to 'watch' the house so we don't get hit again. I guess I feel violated and unsafe now.

I told my daughters that it was windy outside last night, so we had to put the decorations in the garage so they wouldn't get blown away. ;)

Any suggestions on how to deal with the culprits if/when we find them? The worse the better, makes me feel better about this all....

I just have to say I sympathize. I lived in a bad neighborhood when I lived in Albuquerque, my car kept getting broken into and I had become SO bitter. I hated our neighbors, I hated the neighborhood, I hated the city. I couldn't wait to get back to the south.

But now that I am here, and in what I consider a good neighborhood, I am so paranoid. I have never done decorations, but my next door neighbor is a landscaper and boy do they go all out for the holidays. For halloween he put out a pile of hay with a scarecrow scene and pumpkins all over. The day I saw it, I said "Thats going to suck when the pumpkins hit his house". It never happened, I was surprised. For Xmas, they put 2 big live xmas trees out front, fully decorated, lights everywhere, things in the yard. It looks fantastic, and so far so good! I put up some lights, but I kept thinking about local kids coming and ripping them down after I risked my life on that ladder on wobbly ground. The wind tore half of them down, and I've decided no more xmas decorations for me.

I don't know an answer, but I hate it for you.

I hate teens with nothing better to do. Before our house was finished being built someone sprayed 6-6-6 on our front door, and painted some of our brand new dark bricks white. The builders 'fixed' it, but the bricks are damaged permanently. They should have replaced them, instead they power washed them. So now near our front door is a set of bricks that look washed out with a film of white over them. I wish I could have found the a$$hats that did it, and when they grow up and buy their first house they put all their savings into, I can ruin a part of it for them. Anyway, I'm bitter. I hate that there's crime, but there's no solution.. and yeah, police are pretty useless in these things. They're more concerned about robberies, and murders.

One year our holiday decorations were stolen/vandalized. We had done a "candy house" type of theme. We had cutout and painted plywood gingerbread men and lined the edge of the yard with them. I made some of the regular outdoor lights up to look like strings of candies. We made big "lollipops" and "kisses" and put them in the yard and on the steps. Wrapped our front door to look like a stick of chewing gum, etc.

Not that long after we had set everything up we received an "anonymous" note (signed "the neighborhood") telling us how inappropriate our decorations were because they were reminiscent of Hansel & Gretel, and how that was a horrible pagan story, etc. The note essentially demanded that we take down our decrations and either put of Christian ("reason for the season") decorations, or opt out of the holidays and do nothing.

We knew the note came from the people directly across the street from us, who were some kind of big-wigs with the local baptist supermegawerehouse church.

We ignored the note, and left our decorations up. Then one day someone had broken the heads off of our gingerbread men, torn down our lights and thrown them in the gutter, pulled our lollipops out of the ground and tossed them around our yard, etc.

So... we picked up the broken pieces, but left the broken headless gingerbread men out, lining the yard. We didn't take them down until July. For Valentine's Day they got little hearts. In April we dressed them in little yellow slickers and rubber duckies. In June they got swim trunks. In July we painted them red, white and blue.

These horrible neighbors decided to sell their house, and tried to put up "for sale" signs on our property, in front of each gingerbread man. I would go out every evening, pull them out of our yard, and place them neatly by their front door. Every morning, they would be back in our yard, so I started pitching them. It must have gotten expensive enough that they have up.

I can't really take on that attitude, that they must have really needed to kick the sh** out of my snowflakes and handmade candycane lawn stakes that my daughter painted. They must have really needed to let off some steam by violating rudolph and santa in the worst way..............

Unfortunately, the motivation behind this destruction was not need but an immature desire to smash and destroy. Green has been directing her profiling talents to your case and she is inclined to believe that the idiotic perps who are most likely to have engineered this stunt are teenage boys. It is possible that there were some sad-ass and pissed off teenage girls who may have participated.

One year our holiday decorations were stolen/vandalized. We had done a "candy house" type of theme. We had cutout and painted plywood gingerbread men and lined the edge of the yard with them. I made some of the regular outdoor lights up to look like strings of candies. We made big "lollipops" and "kisses" and put them in the yard and on the steps. Wrapped our front door to look like a stick of chewing gum, etc.

Not that long after we had set everything up we received an "anonymous" note (signed "the neighborhood") telling us how inappropriate our decorations were because they were reminiscent of Hansel & Gretel, and how that was a horrible pagan story, etc. The note essentially demanded that we take down our decrations and either put of Christian ("reason for the season") decorations, or opt out of the holidays and do nothing.

We knew the note came from the people directly across the street from us, who were some kind of big-wigs with the local baptist supermegawerehouse church.

We ignored the note, and left our decorations up. Then one day someone had broken the heads off of our gingerbread men, torn down our lights and thrown them in the gutter, pulled our lollipops out of the ground and tossed them around our yard, etc.

So... we picked up the broken pieces, but left the broken headless gingerbread men out, lining the yard. We didn't take them down until July. For Valentine's Day they got little hearts. In April we dressed them in little yellow slickers and rubber duckies. In June they got swim trunks. In July we painted them red, white and blue.

These horrible neighbors decided to sell their house, and tried to put up "for sale" signs on our property, in front of each gingerbread man. I would go out every evening, pull them out of our yard, and place them neatly by their front door. Every morning, they would be back in our yard, so I started pitching them. It must have gotten expensive enough that they have up.

I love this story! Thanks, Wheetsin. :biggrin1:

Our neighborhood pretty much goes all out decorating for holidays. The HOA gives prizes and puts signs in the yards of the winners. This year I've heard about 2 neighbors whose yard decorations were stolen. We had the police tell us as a group to report EVERYTHING. They compile lists of crimes and patrol areas with problems more often.

In both cases of stolen decorations, a small blue pickup truck was seen leaving the scene. We think these folks are taking expensive items that they can resell. We do not think that it is vandalism by kids.

I'm just telling this to reinforce the advice given earlier that this type of crime should be reported to the police. You may think that the police isn't doing anything when in fact, they are quietly working on it and may eventually be able to find the culprits and put a stop to it.

We're all determined not to let a few creeps ruin our joy of decorating for the holidays. :confused:...............

Green, since you're checking this thread today, I just want to tell you that I hope you won't ever just one day stop posting and make us all wonder what happened to you like Carlene, Tired Old Man and a few others have. I miss them so much and I worry that TOM was sick and doesn't feel like posting at LBT. I would be truly upset if anything happened to you!

Wheetsin, you rock!

I haven't been hit yet, but the poor guy across the street who spends every waking moment outside working on something because he won some kind of settlement (lucky guy) and doesn't work (didn't I say lucky), anyway, back to topic but out a big production for Halloween.

Bales and bales of hay. SEVERAL scarecrows, pumpkins, etc.

Well, some punk took their truck and ran right through their yard. Seriously! Ran the who thing over and tore up their brand new sod.

Some people just suck.:confused:

(Writing this after the fact - wow, I really went on a rave here).

We have a corner lot. And we're the first residential intersection coming off of a road that borders open land/wooded area on one side. Kids like to come down that road, turn into the residential area, and "doughnut" in our intersection. Not only does this wake us up very rudely at 3am, but usually the doughnut fails and we end up having deep tire/wheel ruts in the strip between street and sidewalk (which we're responsible for), and on into our yard. I'm going to estimate 6 - 8 times per year we have to go out there and full the ruts with soil & reseed because we're responsible for it if (I can just imagine someone turning their ankle stepping into the rut). And because we like our yard to look nice. We have no topsoil, it's 100% clay under our grass, so it gets VERY soft and squishy when it's wet, and then dries VERY hard. Needless to say, it can be a good bit of work/expense to fix this.

Also, for a long time, we've had a large patch of grass that would die almost as soon as it started growing. We've tried fungicides, insecticides, fertilizers - all with the same results. Since taking a job where I can work from home, I've learned that our front yard is the hang out spot for parents and children waiting for the bus. Oh no, they can't be bothered to actually wait on the sidewalk, they loiter in our yard, sit on our retaining wall, etc. And kill our grass. We have landscape edging done with "edge stones" (interlocking bricks that can be angled to form curves) and the kids like to walk that like it's a balance beam, which causes them to shift and we have to re-set them. And we have three trees on the strip between the sidewalk and street, and the trees have edgestone borders around the bases with river rock inside, and they like to take the river rock (which we paid for, hauled, and put in place) and chuck it into the street, or even down the sewer drain. One time I went to run an errand and caught about 4 kids scooping up the river rock and throwing it into the sewer, so I pulled my car over and asked them to please stop doing that. I didn't yell, lose my temper, curse, etc. I just said "Please stop throwing our rocks into the sewer." One of their moms apparently lives 2 houses down because she came running over like I had just cut her kid's head off and asked what was going on. When I told her that we have a problem with kids throwing the rock into the sewer, she loked at me like I had a second head and was like "They're KIDS, what do you expect?" When I said "Enough quality supervision that they can't vandalize my property or my possessions" she just huffed off. No apology, no visible discipline.

The last few snows have been very revealing, because they show where, exactly, people walk. And I'll tell you -- I really have to wonder WHY people need to walk the whole length of our street-side within 3 fee4t of our house (not on the sidewalk, but close enough to our house that they could touch it), or why they need to walk up to our windows (we keep blinds drawn on all ground level windows, so there's nothing to see). I'm starting to wish we could just fence in our entire property because people truly have NO respect for others' property -- this goes for children, adults, and everything in between.

I have stood at my window and watched people walking their dogs along the sidewalk bordering our property, letting their dogs walk into our yard and take a crap. And then I raise the window, and ask these people, "Please don't let your dog crap in our yard" they say "It doesn't hurt anything" and keep walking, no picking it up or anything. Or more often they say nothing, and just let the dog continue. So then when my husband goes to mow the grass, he ends up tracking dog shit into the garage and I have to go scrub the conrete floor to get rid of it.

The neighbors behind us have a cat that roams, and always wants to roam into our yard. We have a fenced yard and a dog that is very protective of his property. He freaks out if there's a strange animal in our yard, and he freaks out when he sees a cat, period. But that's why we have a 4 ft fence and a 13lb dog. This cat wanders into our yard all the time and shits in the grass and pees on my bushes and kills them. We've asked our neighbor countless times to keep his cat out of our yard and he just says "That's what cats do, you need to get over it." This summer the cat was in our yard - we didn't see it and let the dog out (yes, we can't even let our own ddog out into your own fenced-in yard without first checking for the cat), the dog took off after it, crashed into the fence, and we walked away with a $3k bill for the surgery it took to repair his leg. I SWEAR that I'm going to get an animal trap, trap the cat, and take it to a shelter 3 hours away so the neighbor can never reclaim it. When I see the cat in our yard, I will turn the hose on it, but I have to 1) see it, 2) get to the hose before it runs out of the yard.

We've tried putting up "keep off the yard please" signs, and little signs that have a picture of a dog pooping with a "no" sign through it... we've tried staking off the problem grass area with wooden stakes and rope so people won't trod there until we can get the grass nicely rooted... but we just come home to find them torn up, or completely disregarded. I have literally driven down the street and seen ADULTS holding their childrens' hands, stepping over the ropes and walking right through the area. In the middle fo our freaking front yard!! For crying out loud people! The sidewalk doesn't go at an angle through our yard, it wraps around the corner. And you're out here walking and exercising, so can't you just take the 20 or so extra steps to actually walk around the corner on the flipping sidewalk?

And we live in a "nice" neighborhood full of apparently ill-behaved children and apathetic yuppy parents. Wish I had a good solution for this one, because annually we have to put about $600 and our labor into fixing problems that are a direct result of this loitering.

Man. Wheetsin, that's awful!

And the other stories people have written, unbelievable!!! I can't believe people would be so ignorant to do things like this.

I love how the previous poster left their headless decorations out all year long. That's priceless. :confused: