The Movie Christmas Vacation Needs a Home Inspection

I don’t know about you, but the first week of the New Year doesn’t really count as the end of the holiday season for me. On January 1, I’m not ready to rock into the New Year with my Vision Board and my resolutions like, “Let’s do this, 2024!” For one thing, my kids are still on break. My house is still fully decorated, the fridge is full of holiday leftovers, there are toys and gifts and bits of wrapping paper EVERYWHERE, no one has done any laundry for weeks — well, you get the picture.

So if you were expecting some New Year’s Resolutions For Your Home, come back next week because we’re not ready yet. What we are doing is watching the greatest holiday movie of all time, “Christmas Vacation,” (feel free to fight me on this in the comments), because I was just having an annual watch party with friends and I couldn’t help but note that the Griswolds are desperately in need of a home inspection.

Hear me out.

That Staple Gun

‘Ol Clark does a lot of things wrong in “Christmas Vacation,” but we have to start somewhere, so let’s talk about the lights. The many, many lights.

Never staple lights to your roof. First of all, you’re damaging the shingles by puncturing them and allowing moisture to seep in, and later rust to form around those staples. Second, you shouldn’t staple the electrical cords themselves. You risk stripping the plastic coating or puncturing the wires. Bad idea, Clark.

So Many Plugs

In case your common sense doesn’t tell you this is a bad idea, you should not put this many plugs into one outlet. Just because you Ameri-can, doesn’t mean you Ameri-should.

When hooking up Christmas lights, you should always spread the wattage out using a surge protector, and try to use multiple outlets, preferably connected to different breakers on your panel if possible. The Griswold’s blinding, spark-inducing display would be tripping that breaker for sure in real life if the breaker was functioning. Otherwise, they’d likely have an electrical fire on their hands on top of the various other disasters.

Trapped in The Attic

When Clark goes into the attic to hide some Christmas presents, his mother-in-law inadvertently closes the attic door behind him, locking him inside. An attic door that you can’t open from inside would definitely be a code violation, not to mention the safety issue of that ladder that slides down and smacks him in the face.

The Griswolds are also lacking any visible insulation in that attic — pretty concerning in a cold Chicago winter!

Residential Sewer Abuse

Ah, Cousin Eddie. Disgusting, yet iconic. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what happens when Cousin Eddie decides to empty his RV’s sewage tank into the gutter on the street. Methane gas builds up under the street. [SPOILER ALERT] The Griswold’s cigar-smoking Uncle Lewis lights up and causes an epic blast.

For all the Cousin Eddie’s out there, just because it’s sometimes called a “sewer” doesn’t mean you can put waste in there. Those gutters on the street are actually just storm drains, meant for water only. Sewage from houses runs through closed lines that can’t be accessed by the public.

Fun Fact About Diving Boards

In Clark’s fantasy about the pool he intends to build with his Christmas bonus check, he envisions a perfect day of family poolside fun — but Cousin Eddie manages to bust into even his daydreams. It occurred to me watching this, you rarely see diving boards at people’s houses anymore unless the pool is really old. Did you know that is because there were so many incidents of injuries in home and public pools that eventually the standards changed?

Home pools are required to be 7.6 feet deep, and 38 feet long in Texas to have a diving board, but most home pools are being built less than 6 feet deep and 35 feet long in more recent times. It’s more expensive and less safe to have a deeper pool.

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If you, like me, are still very much on “Christmas Vacation,” I invite you to enjoy a movie night, and add your home inspection notes to this post!