Elizabeth O’Brien was doing chores on a Saturday afternoon when her 8-year-old son came to her, his eyes alight.

“Mommy, you’ve got to see this,” he said. “It’s on the front lawn.”

O’Brien stepped outside her Oak Park bungalow to find her husband, John, with a big grin on his face, and her two younger children running in gleeful circles. At the center of the excitement was a brand-new, 15-foot-tall Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer inflatable lawn ornament. A Rudolph so tall he made adults look like children, and children look like elves.

A Rudolph so wide he made the O’Briens’ modest front yard look like a postage stamp.

Seeking to shine a little extra light in a difficult year, Chicagoans are going big with their 2020 holiday lawn ornaments, festooning porches that usually go bare and debuting eye-catching and over-the-top pieces: Christmas unicorns and dragons, life-size Buddy the Elf blow-ups and towering 12-foot snowmen from “Frozen.”

In suburban Highland Park and in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, residents came together to erect light arches over the sidewalk. In the Rogers Park neighborhood, Treacy Greer managed to hoist an 11-foot pine tree onto her third-floor deck and festoon it with 800 colored lights.

“It just seemed like a good year to go big,” said Rebeccah Willard, 43, an oncology nurse in Oak Park who bought an 11-foot inflatable reindeer. “I think everyone’s feeling we need a little more joy, 2020 being what it has been.”

During a recent earnings call with analysts, Home Depot CEO Craig A. Menear cited strong Halloween decor sales and said the company had similar expectations for Christmas. Customers, he said, appear to be craving normalcy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At Needful Things gift shop in Oak Park, owner Tom White said he was seeing first-time buyers of outdoor decor, as well as strong demand for inflatables.

“People have been shopping much earlier, and all of our sales are much larger, and everybody’s buying outdoor stuff: Santas, snowmen,” said White.

Elizabeth O’Brien, 40, a product manager for a trade association, wasn’t happy, initially, to see her yard overtaken by what looks like a giant reindeer from outer space. She eyed her new 15-foot Rudolph, her husband and her children, Ian, 8, Cormac, 6, and Cecelia, 3.

“Mmm hmm,” she said. “Mmm hmm.”

And then she turned around and went back in the house.

Inflatables are not her style: “I swore never,” she said.

And while her husband, a science teacher at Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, had thoughtfully notified their next door neighbors that Rudolph was coming and secured their approval, he hadn’t consulted with Elizabeth.

“I was seriously going to poison his gin,” she quipped.

Due to the size and positioning of the reindeer, his backside became the view from her front windows. As the sky grew dark, Rudolph lit up — and swung his head back and forth in an animatronic approximation of good cheer that struck O’Brien as downright menacing.

O’Brien went to post a photo on Facebook of her husband toasting the holidays, Rudolph at his side.

She noted in her post that what had just happened was “ridiculous,” “obscene” and very on brand for 2020, and responses started pouring in. Her friends loved Rudolph and confessed to hilarious new holiday decorating excesses of their own.

One neighbor said she had so many outdoor lights that the porch-light sensors had been fooled into thinking it was daylight and refused to activate.

O’Brien was charmed, but what really changed her mind about Rudolph, she said, was when she saw how happy her husband was, and how much the reindeer thrilled her kids.

“This whole year is surreal and upsetting, and inflatables are also upsetting — but in an absurd and funny way,” she said. “We’re all looking for something that’s goofy that’s harmless, just something a little different than we’ve ever had before.”

Greer, 55, an executive assistant, has had a Christmas tree on her third-floor deck for about 14 years. When her daughter, Emily Kirkpatrick, 12, was little, Greer would tell her that when Santa comes down from Canada, he has a choice: go right to California, left to New York, or straight ahead to Chicago.

“If he can see the star on our tree, he’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s a landing strip. That’s the house I should come to first,’ ” Greer would say.

The tree is always big and visible from other buildings and the street. Parents show it to kids when they tour the neighborhood looking for lights. Once Greer heard a homeless man in a nearby park talking about it: “Look,” he said pointing to her deck. “That’s my tree.”

This year, Greer wanted to light up the neighborhood with her biggest tree ever.

She initially wanted a 14-footer, she said, but an outdoor pulley system wasn’t an option — she checked — so she has to be able to haul the tree up four flights of stairs.

“There’s really not enough Advil or wine in the world to make more than 11 feet possible,” Greer said.

The O’Briens’ giant inflatable Rudolph has become a neighborhood attraction. On Facebook, a mother posted that her little boy had played at his hooves for 15 minutes. Passersby take photos. People go out of their way on their daily walks to see him.

Sometimes, when the reindeer is lying down, uninflated, John O’Brien will come outside to see people standing on the sidewalk, staring at the pile of limp fabric. They look up at O’Brien expectantly, and he pushes the button that brings Rudolph back to life.

“This very silly, obnoxious vision of unbridled joy — maybe it’s a relief or something,” he said. “But I’m happy that people are liking it.”

Elizabeth O’Brien still jokingly refers to her giant reindeer as “15 feet of horror,” but now in the morning she finds herself saying, “We have to put up Rudolph.”

Of course the reindeer could meet with an unfortunate accident — a pin prick perhaps, she said mischievously.

But if that doesn’t happen, she expects Rudolph will remain part of the O’Brien family Christmas for years to come.