Terms of Service

Effective October 12, 2026.

1. Who we are and what this covers

The Christmas Joyride runs a holiday home decorating contest and a map of decorated houses. You are reading this on our website at christmasjoyride.com or in the Christmas Joyride app for iPhone and Android. In these terms, “we” and “us” mean The Christmas Joyride, and “you” means anyone who uses the site or the app.

Write to us at The Christmas Joyride, 111 Ungerboeck Park, Dardenne Prairie, MO 63368, or email the support address at the bottom of this site.

Using the site or the app means you accept these terms and our Privacy Policy. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site or the app.

2. Who can use it

Anyone can look at the map and the feed. You need to be 13 or older to give us an email, vote, post, comment or enter a house. If you are under 18, get a parent or guardian to agree to these terms with you.

To enter a house you need to live in the United States and the house needs to sit inside a market we have opened. Every market runs its own contest with its own dates, categories and prizes. People anywhere can browse, plan a drive and vote.

Our staff, the agents and sponsors who pay to take part, and the people who live in their households can enter a house and take a joyride, but they cannot win a prize.

3. The contest rules

The dates, the categories, the prizes and who put each prize up are on the Prizes page for your market, and the app shows the same thing. Those pages are part of these terms. Voting opens and closes at the times posted for your market, in that market’s own time zone, and it shuts off on its own at the posted moment. We may add, rename or retire a category between seasons.

When a season ends we archive it and start a new one. Past seasons stay on record. A new season lets everyone vote again.

4. Your account

You do not create a password to browse, tour, vote or enter a house. Your phone or your browser gets a device ID, and that ID is how we recognize you. If you give us your email address, we attach it to that device record. You can move your record to a new phone or a new browser with a sign in link we email you, or by scanning a short lived code shown on the website. Agents, their assistants, sponsors and our own staff log in with a password.

You are responsible for what happens on your device record. Tell us if you think somebody else has it.

You can change the email on your record, because typos happen. Changing it moves the votes you already cast over to the new address. If the new address has already voted on some of the same houses, those duplicate votes drop. We tell you how many will be lost before you confirm.

5. Voting

• Voting takes an email address. Looking at the map, the feed and the leaderboard does not, and neither does liking a post.
• Each email address can vote once per house per category.
• You can vote for as many houses as you like. A joyride is a route of many houses, and we want you voting on all of them.
• A device that has already voted for a house cannot vote for that same house again under a different email address.
• After you vote we offer to send you a one time link to confirm your email. Confirm it and every vote from that address counts twice, that season and every season after. You only confirm once.
• Voters pick the category, not homeowners. A homeowner tags their house so people can find it on the map. What the crowd votes it into is what decides the contest.
• Some tags are there only to help people find houses on the map and cannot be voted into. The app and the site say which.
• Votes belong to the season they were cast in. Starting a new season clears the one vote per email rule so last year’s voters can vote again.
• We watch for unusual voting patterns and review them by hand. We may discount or remove votes that look automated, bought or faked, and we may disqualify a house that benefited from them. That call is ours.
• Numbers on the leaderboard are unofficial until we announce winners.

6. Where your email goes when you vote

This is the part people ask about, so here it is plainly.

When you vote for a house, your email address goes to two places: The Christmas Joyride, and the real estate agent who sponsored that house. That agent may contact you about real estate. That is how the contest pays for itself.

You can vote for as many houses as you like, and different houses can have different sponsoring agents. So the same email address can become a lead for more than one agent. We are not going to limit your voting to avoid that, and we would rather tell you up front than bury it.

Each agent sees only the people who voted on their own houses. One agent never sees another agent’s list, and we do not sell these lists to anyone outside the contest. Homeowners never see who voted, viewed, pinned or liked. They see totals and nothing else.

Nobody texts you. We contact you by email, and by push notification if you turned those on. We do not gather your phone number for this, and we do not hand a number to an agent so they can text you. If you would rather not hear from an agent, ask them to take you off their list, or write to us and we will pass it on.

7. Entering your house

• You have to live at the house or have the owner’s permission to enter it.
• Your house’s address, its name, your description, your photos and your video are shown in public on the map, in the feed and on the leaderboard, so people can find the house and drive by. Do not enter a house if you do not want that address public.
• Your house goes into the contest for the market its address falls in. We work that out from the address.
• If you signed up through an agent’s link, that agent sponsors your house and receives the email address of everybody who votes for it. If you signed up without a link, our own team sponsors your house. We can move a house to a different agent when there is a reason to.
• You get a share link for your house. Sharing it is how you win. Do not buy votes, run scripts, or ask anyone else to.
• Prizes and yard signs are handled by us and by the sponsoring agent for your market. What is included is on the Prizes page.
• We can hide or remove a house, a photo or a description that breaks these terms or that we do not think fits a family event.

8. Photos, video and anything else you upload

What you upload stays yours. By uploading it you give us permission to show, resize, crop and share it on this site, in the app, in the emails we send about the contest and in our marketing for the contest, and you let the sponsoring agent for your house share it the same way. This permission lasts as long as the content is on the service and for a reasonable time after, in archives and past season pages.

Only upload photos and video you took or have the right to use. Do not upload pictures of other people who have not agreed to it, and do not upload anything that belongs to somebody else. If you believe something on the site infringes your copyright, email us with the details and we will look at it.

9. Posts, comments and likes

Posting and commenting take an email address. Liking does not. Be kind. No profanity, nudity, harassment, threats, hate, spam, scams or advertising unless you are a paying sponsor. Nothing illegal.

Posts and comments can be checked by an automated filter before they appear. We use Anthropic’s Claude for that check. Anything the filter flags waits in a queue until somebody on our team approves or removes it. You can flag a post too. We can remove any post or comment, and we can stop somebody posting, without telling you first.

10. Prizes

Winners are the houses with the most counted votes in each category when voting closes for their market, after the review in section 5. We may ask a winner to confirm who they are and that they live at the house before a prize goes out. Prizes cannot be swapped or exchanged for cash unless we agree, and they cannot be transferred. A winner is responsible for any tax on a prize, and we may need tax paperwork before handing over a prize worth enough to require it. If we cannot reach a winner within fourteen days, we can pick the next house down.

Prizes are put up by us and by sponsors. This contest is not run, sponsored or endorsed by Apple, Google, or any other company whose products you use to reach it.

11. Driving the joyride

Routes are suggestions. Obey traffic laws, park legally, stay on public streets and sidewalks, and respect private property. Do not walk onto somebody’s lawn and do not knock on the door. Set your route before you pull out, and do not use your phone while you are driving. We are not responsible for route accuracy, road conditions, what your maps app tells you, or anything that happens on your drive.

12. Messages we send

We reach people by email and, if you allow them, by push notification in the app. We never send text messages. You can turn push notifications off in the app or in your phone settings, and every marketing email has an unsubscribe link. Email about something you asked for, like a sign in link, a verification link or a route you asked us to send, is not marketing and still goes out.

13. Agents and sponsors

Agents and sponsors accept these terms plus whatever is shown at signup and at payment. In short: an agent gets the email addresses of people who vote on the houses signed up through their link, and may use those addresses for their own follow up. An agent may not text those people, may not sell or trade the list, and has to honor an opt out and follow the law that applies to them, including their brokerage’s rules and the CAN-SPAM Act. An agent is an independent business, not our employee or partner, and we are not responsible for what an agent says or does.

Fees cover the season or the term shown at purchase. Payments are handled by Square. Fees are not refundable once a season has started unless we agree otherwise. An account that is not paid up is paused: the agent keeps their houses and their leads and can still log in, but their link stops attributing new houses to them. A brokerage that buys seats manages its own seats, and a seat lasts as long as the brokerage’s term.

14. Other companies we use

Running this takes a handful of outside services: Square for agent and sponsor payments, Anthropic for the post filter, Expo along with Apple and Google to deliver push notifications, OpenStreetMap and Google for map tiles and for turning an address into a point on the map, and the US Census Bureau for the county outlines we use to draw market boundaries. We also use a web host and an email service. Each of them has its own terms. The Privacy Policy says what information reaches which one.

15. Things you may not do

Do not break into the service or try to. Do not scrape it, script it, or run bots against it. Do not use fake or disposable email addresses to farm votes. Do not impersonate somebody else. Do not collect other people’s information from the site. Do not use the map or the house list to build a mailing list of your own. We can suspend or remove any account, house, post or vote that does any of this.

16. Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself from the profile screen in the app, and it really deletes. You can also email us from the address on your account and ask. The Privacy Policy says exactly what goes and what stays, including what happens to your house and to the votes cast on it.

17. The fine print

The site and the app are provided as they are, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty that they will be available, accurate or fit for a particular purpose. We do not promise the service will be up at any given moment, and we are not liable for a vote that did not go through because your phone lost signal.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages, and our total liability to you for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or fifty dollars if you paid us nothing. Some states do not allow those limits, so they may not apply to you.

You agree to cover us for claims that come out of what you upload or do on the service, including a claim from somebody in one of your photos or from the owner of a house you entered without permission.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. Anything we cannot sort out between us belongs in the state or federal courts in Missouri, and we both agree to that. If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest still stands.

18. Changes

We may change these terms. The date at the top says when the current version took effect, and we post a notice on the site when a change matters. Using the site or the app after a change means you accept it. If you do not, delete your account.

19. Contact

Questions about these terms, a prize, a vote or an agent who contacted you: email the support address at the bottom of this site, or write to The Christmas Joyride, 111 Ungerboeck Park, Dardenne Prairie, MO 63368.