"Deck the Halls" does the job fine, and although Aunt Mabel is going to warm to its macramé and jello-mold spirit a lot more than nose-pierced Nikki, it is a better option than the third "Santa Clause."

Matthew Broderick and Danny DeVito do the old uptight homeowner/wacky neighbor routine as they fight over the increasingly elaborate holiday lights festooning the house where Buddy (DeVito) has just moved in. Barely keeping them on a leash are their wives: DeVito's got Kristin Chenoweth and Broderick has Kristin Davis. Two cuter Kristins you could not ask for, and Chenoweth even gets to sing.

Everybody lives in an idyllic snow-graced Massachusetts village that brought to mind my own youth in Massachusetts, only in the sense that that's where I first saw phony little Tweetowns like this one on TV.

Broderick, as an optometrist named Finch, is so organized he has the next five years' worth of Christmas trees growing in a private nature preserve. "When you talk about Christmas caroling," says his Kristin, it shouldn't be necessary to use the term 'flanking maneuver.'"

Buddy, a bored car salesman struggling with debt, starts decorating his home obsessively after his daughters discover that the house doesn't show up on a global-mapping Web site. "We're invisible," Buddy complains.

His character anchors what could have been just a holiday-shtick movie, with gags about runaway sleighs and a local cop who favors ladies' underwear. Buddy's problem isn't that he has too much joie de Noel; he's depressed and thinks the lights will make him somebody.

Our sympathies shift from one to the other: Finch has a point about his slumber being disrupted by the all-night traffic, especially when his neighbor's light show turns into an extravaganza that even Steve Wynn would find excessive, but then again Buddy is just trying to beat the blues.

The gags are familiar, but there are random funny moments, such as when Buddy's brainless daughter picks up some Emily Dickinson and marvels, "It's not giving me a headache or anything." And the ending is so sweet that it'll send your family out of the theater for 31/2 solid minutes of smiles before everyone starts drinking and pointing fingers again.