Yikes! The Plastic Pink Flamingos are Coming!!!!!!!

Ok...we are used to flocks of Canadian Geese flying overhead and making lots of noise in the Spring and Fall.

People are not so thrilled when they settle for awhile in their yards and make a mess.

But pink plastic flamingos?

I though the real and the plastic ones only hung out in Florida? I used to see them at the Hialeah Race Track when I lived there.

Much to my surprise a flock of plastic ones has appeared on a lawn on my street.

They are everywhere. All over the yard and even on top of the air conditioner.

They are even hanging out in the trees. Could this be a new fad I missed out on somehow?

The plastic pink flamingo was invented in 1957, when a young designer named Don Featherstone rendered it for Union Products, a lawn-and-garden plastics company located outside Boston. Featherstone’s art tapped into a national fascination with all things Floridian at a time when middle-class tourism was booming. After World War II, families began en masse to take road trips; many of them to the Florida beaches. They drove back north with their cars brimming with knickknacks; porcelain palm trees and plastic flamingos. The fact that the state’s real flamingos had been hunted to extinction in the late nineteenth century for their plumes and meat didn’t seem to matter. At $2.76 a pair, the plastic birds were a cheap way to lend a bit of “nature” to manicured lawns.

Flocks of plastic pink flamingos spread out across America in the 1960s. However, as with all “hot” trends, the birds then began to draw our ire. In a 1969 book titled Kitsch: the World of Bad Taste, author Gillo Dorfles called mass-produced lawn ornaments the epitome of vulgarity and the archetypal kitsch.