christmas is coming to town

This piece is filled with wonderfully cute and whimsical characters. The designs within the designs are very interesting to look at and create interesting texture.
There are few things that bug me about the piece and they could just be personal taste.
The red and orange on the house really seem to clash against one another as they are. I think maybe the lightness of the lines is not helping as the red, especially in the shingles, read as a darker value than the line.
While I like the dripping stuff at the bottom and the little curls at the top of some of them, I'm not sure why the rest of the actual artwork is sitting within such an oddly shaped frame. It seems like an attempt to make something that is already strange, even stranger, and it strikes me as unneccessary especially as it causing odd tangents with the actual art. A round shape, an egg shape, even a square shape would, I think, have been better.
Lastly, the background gradient ,while sharing a color pallet with the piece is odd in some way I can't righly explain and looks kind of slapped on.