Special Ingredients: Decorating Delirium

The Christmas season is already well underway. For those of you who are unaware, the Christmas season started on October 23rd this year, and the government expects the date to keep falling back, little by little, until one day, it starts on December 26th. Sadly, I’ll probably be dead by then, which really sucks, because it would be so much simpler just to leave the decorations up all year round.

I love Christmas decorations, and even decorating has some appeal to it. It’s a nice change of pace to transform your rundown, smelly, rat-infested shack into a rundown, smelly, rat-infested shack with Santa figures and trees all around (although you might want to consider moving if the tree is actively growing out of the floorboards on its own accord). The end result always makes me stare in wonderment and let out a satisfied sigh, at least until I realize that I’ll have to take all of this stuff down and throw it back into storage come January, but usually July.

If you think about it, decorating for Christmas is actually kind of idiotic, as I alluded to in a previous article. Indoor decorating makes perfect sense; you do it indoors, where there’s ideally more heat and less snow than outside. Still, there are some flaws even in this solid logic.

The big issue here is Christmas lights. A normal, rational human being would never accessorize their house with cheap, fourth-world-manufactured lights that come with pre-installed electrical shorts for your convenience and peril. It’s especially stupid to hang these on a slowly-drying plant organism that is reasonably flammable. Yet around the holidays, people who don’t decorate their houses with these elements are viewed and scorned as “humbuggers” or people of other religions who aren’t Christian and take their beliefs seriously.

In the event that their houses aren’t burned to the ground, most people continue their decorating outside. This is where the truly flawed logic begins. For those readers who haven’t grasped the concept yet, outside is usually pretty cold in the winter, and cold is something people tend to avoid. To help this concept sink it, go outside when it’s cold (if there’s white stuff covering everything, it might be cold) and stand perfectly still without any clothes on. Before too long, the police will come and arrest you. This is how bad the cold can be.

Yet people rush outside, fully clothed in some cases, and start climbing ladders and driving stakes into steel-grade frozen ground, hanging decorations with a festive and precarious air. Besides running the risk of plummeting off of a ladder, decorators also have to worry about electrical shock outside, too. I’m not sure what genius thought that electrical lights were a good idea for a season where snow, which is basically water, which doesn’t mix well with electricity, could seep into the electrical work and take out Dad, who would very likely be experiencing the resulting electrocution while clinging to a shaky metal ladder. My guess is the guy who came up with the idea was a big fan of potent eggnog.

Those decorators who survive the process of decorating are rewarded, upon plugging their masterpiece into the nearest outlet, with nothing. That’s because these lights, again, are manufactured in countries that don’t have electricity themselves, so the principles of proper electrical function are just beyond their grasp. Usually, the cause is one, single, burned-out bulb that can be detected easily by replacing each bulb on the string, one at a time, until you discover the entire line is bad and begin looking for places to attach it to so you can hang yourself.

If by some Christmas miracle everything works, you can stand back and admire your handy work until you pass out from hypothermia. If the medics are able to revive you, though, you can continue to revel in your accomplishment, which I’m sure will be worth the three toes you will lose to frostbite.

But seriously, there are a lot of ways decorating can be fun. I, personally, haven’t experienced a single one of these, so I’m just assuming, since a lot of people put some serious effect into their home decorating. For example, there is a family in Oregon that’s famous for covering every inch of their house and yard with lights. This is completely true. This display is visible from space. Onlookers routinely have to dive for cover to avoid being hit in the head by oncoming commercial airliners who have mistaken the light display as landing lights. I’m certain they have to send their kids to work at shoe factories just to pay for the electric bill.

We try to make our outdoor light display look festive, but out efforts have waned over the years. This is most evident in the case of our pine tree, which we used to decorate easily, until the last ten years, when the tree suddenly became the size of Godzilla, its green, towering form daring us to hang lights on it. I think Godzilla himself would be easier to decorate.

But we manage, and I think our efforts show more than some of the others who decorate their yards with blow-up dolls. You know what I’m talking about: they have to be filled with air to get the most use out of, have a lot of curves and holes, and bring perverse and cheap jollies to those who use them. Yes, I’m talking about those decorations that you set out on the lawn, and then inflate, revealing classic Christmas figures like Santa, Frosty the Snowman, and Winnie the Pooh.

Frankly, I can’t stand these things, mainly because everyone has them, but also because they take the challenge out of the decorating process. When I see someone who has their lawn littered with these things, I think to myself “There’s a lazy Scrooge who doesn’t care enough about Christmas to risk frost bite and electrocution just so they can have the opportunity to spread some cheer to the electric company after their bill arrives.”

No matter what type of decorations you choose, you can be secured in the knowledge that some snot neighbor is going to outdo you tenfold with a holiday light show that rivals the Northern Lights. So just toss a random wad of lights on the roof and go inside to enjoy some Christmas cheer, preferably via eggnog. Happy holidays!