More than 200 holiday inflatables displayed at Mount Sidney home

MOUNT SIDNEY, Va. (WVIR) - After taking last year off during the height of the pandemic, a family in Mount Sidney has brought back a beloved holiday tradition.

The James family sets up more than 200 inflatable Christmas decorations in their front yard. During the day, the yard looks a little sad with deflated decorations, but when the sun starts to set, the inflatables wake up.

The first inflatables came when John’s son Spenser was just 3 years old. “Cheerful, amazing. I love inflatables,” Spenser, who is now 17, said.

“Each year we started to buy a few more here and there, especially after the Christmas sales,” John stated. “We have 211 out now. We have another 113 in the garage that we never got out this year.”

Each one is staked to the ground with the strings looking like a scene from “Mission Impossible.”

“We fall all the time. We’ve been doing it for years and we still fall over sometimes,” John stated.

They plug in eight totes worth of extension cords, and in about two and a half weeks time the front yard is a scene of Christmas cheer.

“My favorite this year would probably be the dinosaur,” Spenser said.

“My favorite’s probably the duck, the rubber duck,” John said.

Every night, the two are down by the road talking to the people who drive to see the James family inflatables.

“You hear little voices hollering ‘mommy there’s Poppy, there’s Mickey Mouse’. That’s what makes all this important. That’s what it’s about,” John said.

The inflatables are up from 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on weeknights and a little later on weekend. The address is 38 Blue Ridge Avenue in Mount Sidney.

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