Beery Christmas (Lights)....................

Trust the occasionally offbeat owner and crew at Max's Taphouse to go with something like this.

Regular Christmas lights don't show up all that well on the exterior of a building, so Max's did a little experimenting and fabricated a whole string of giant "oversized" Christmas lights to adorn the roofline of the bar's buildings.

A closer examination, however, will show the true ingenuity of this decoration.  The "lights" combine a string of ordinary 110-volt light sockets and colored compact-fluorescent light bulbs (the light source) with large plastic balls that fit perfectly over said light fixtures.

And where, pray tell, did the balls come from?  They're recycled/reused "Key Keg" PET balls, the guts of recyclable plastic-and-cardboard "kegs" used by many of the European brewers such as BrewDog to ship one-way shipments of low-volume, high-cost quantities of beer to the States!  (A lot of said beers come through local importer Legends Limited.)  I asked bartender Bob Simko where they kept the balls until they built the decorations.  "All over the place!" he said.

Knowing Max's, I'm expecting this is only a preview of forthcoming decorations.  (For Halloween, the roof featured, among other things, a moving giant spider.)