Season’s greetings come in on a yule tide of yuks
With their ‘Winter Punderland,’ a Costa Mesa family has fun packing the language with holiday punch.
To the untrained eye, the holiday decor of the Gunderson family’s home in Costa Mesa might not seem unusual.
To the pun-trained eye, though? That’s a house of a different color.
Rather than the typical blend of twinkling lights, inf latable yard ornaments and other boisterous baubles, Kyle and Cori Gunderson decked their walls this year with decorations depicting seasonal puns.
The result is “Winter Punderland,” an array of yuletide yuks, each of which packs quite a punch.
Since the display went up this month, it has been met with laughs from neighbors, Kyle Gunderson said.
A video starring Cori Gunderson as a sometimes deadpan, sometimes exaggeratedly animated tour guide has attracted more than 23 million views on Facebook and almost 93,000 more on YouTube.
As a self-professed pundit, Kyle Gunderson, 29, said he’s well-versed in how puns can leave some people rolling in the aisles and others rolling their eyes.
“Puns are funny when people laugh and even funnier when they don’t,” he said.
Looking down from the second story of the Gunderson house are two regal figures with a stock-market ticker behind them — stock kings, in other words.
Elsewhere is a suit of armor with a finger to its lips. A silent knight, if you will.
The front walk is flanked on one side by three gardening hoes in a row (hoe, hoe, hoe) and a stand of candyflecked rods adorned with pictures of English actor Michael Caine. Think about it.
“Trust me, there were plenty that my wife helped me weed out,” Gunderson said with a laugh. “I’m very thankful for that.”
One idea left on the cutting-room f loor was to have a goat figurine standing on a hill with its tail ablaze — “goat tail lit on the mountain.”
Gunderson also kicked around the idea of a footthemed play on mistletoe but said “that turned out to be pretty creepy when we got the prosthetic foot.”
Of the puns that did make the cut, Gunderson’s favorite might be hanging over the garage. It’s the entire alphabet, save for one letter. There’s no “L.” As in Noel.
Gunderson credited that particular groaner to his father, Dave, who lent a hand with the decorations and served as a vital sounding board while the display was pun-der development.
When Gunderson was younger, the two would work together to ready the family’s home for the holidays. Another tradition was peppering each other with puns — a practice in which Gunderson’s grandfather also took part.
It should come as no surprise, then, that “Winter Punderland” isn’t the first time Gunderson has tapped into his punner heritage during the holidays.
For Halloween, he and some of his colleagues at Abrams Coastal Properties — a Balboa Island-based real estate firm where he is marketing director — dressed in costumes representing different styles of homes.
Gunderson made a splash by donning a fullbody fish outfit and a cape to become “Cape Cod.”
Looking ahead to next year, Gunderson said he hopes to work with his father to forge another pun-drous display, perhaps at the patriarch’s home on Balboa Island.
“One thing I’ve really loved is seeing how many pun lovers there are out there,” Gunderson said of the reaction to this year’s display. “You kind of feel alone when you have so many people rolling their eyes at you.”