Says one of the participants in a Christmas-decorating style described in "A man strung Christmas lights from his home to his neighbor’s to support her. The whole community followed" (WaPo).
Don't get any ideas about stringing lights across the street — from house to house — in your neighborhood. With ideas, it won't be organic, it won't have just happened, there will be planning. It does look nice... but what if I don't want to be connected by lights to my neighbor? Suddenly, I'm the Scrooge?
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'but what if I don't want to be connected by lights to my neighbor? Suddenly, I'm the Scrooge?'
Either Scrooge or Jewish : )
And who plugs in?
My neighbors on either side are big-time decorators. Both installed extra circuits to power the load safely.
I wouldn't want to be paying their tab, no matter how jolly I'm feeling...
Our little neighbor group went all-out with Christmas lights on both sides of our street this year. We joked about throwing some strings of lights over the cable-TV wire running across the street, to mark our territory like tennis shoes in gang turf.
Suddenly?
but what if I don't want to be connected by lights to my neighbor? Suddenly, I'm the Scrooge?
If your neighbor offers and you decline, then all signs point to yes.
If you're expected to buy a bunch of lights and string 'em up yourself, then my sources say no.
but what if I don't want to be connected by lights to my neighbor?
What kind of a liberal are you?
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of few, and especially those of the one.
"It could be seen up and down Cleveland Street... Only one thing could drag me away from the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window."
Organic is one of those words -- a hipster synonym for fresh, real, healthy, uncomplicated, and spontaneous that's thoughtlessly on the lips of usually thoughtless people.
Ace twelve semester hours of organic chemistry, then get back to me about how fresh, real, healthy, uncomplicated, and spontaneous it all was.
"Organic" referring to decorating is a hippie word.
American Holiday Philosophy--if it's worth doing, it's worth waaaaaay overdoing.
I let my wife string lights--just some red and white around the windows and doors--the first Christmas we were here, despite knowing that the little sticky holders would pull the paint off when we were done.
"I told you so." The best gift I could have given myself.
She has done all the decorating inside already, which is unusually early.
One of the few nice things about my decade of hell in Baltimore was the street a few blocks from my home, decorated for Christmas. Ok, over-decorated. WAAAAY overdecorated.
No, really, way overdecorated..
And they missed a chance to throw in a literary classic about how it just grew, like Topsy.
Yeah - don't scrooge me, man.
Not original with me, but: Arrow, and "Ditto."
If you write a post one day that says "I pretty much skip Christmas, but I don't make a thing out of that. I just continue as usual, living in the day, respecting all the days as equal. I don't like feeling that a particular day is special. It detracts from the dayness of the day."
Then follow it up a few days later with this post about how stringing lights to your house might not be something unacceptable, then yeah, you pretty much nailed the Scrooge part. It's not that you don't like a neighbor's light strung up to your house. It's that you selected this post to comment on it at all. It's a nice story, but could have easily been left alone. Yet you either felt compelled to comment on it and make a Scroogie point, or to drag it through your commenters streets like a nicely cooked filet, knowing we're all carnivores here.
Organic can also be common sense: from the ground up- innate… but then, I argued the definition of ignorant w/a nun who was missing only a certain smudge of a mustache under her nose and above the stubborn line of her thin lips: as a willful denial, so: who am I?
Besides- you could play for a day or2- not all season.
Reminds me of a story a friend told of her former neighborhood. She and her husband came home from visiting family and found that someone had put a flashing bulb in every strand of their outdoor lights…along the roof and various plants/trees so that the whole house and yard was flashing. They thought they knew who did it, so in the middle of the night they took out the flashers on their strand and put them on a neighbor’s lights. He suspected someone else did it, so he moved the flashers along…it became a progressive prank. It wasn’t until a neighborhood cocktail party that they actually found out the original culprit. Pretty much everyone suspected the wrong neighbor.
It might be organic but given the unnecessary and ostentatious carbonated foot print, it's definitely unsustainable. Somewhere Greta Thunberg is crying.
Years ago I had a house on my block that just had one big ball of lights on an evergreen just off the front porch. I'm sure the wife hectored her husband, who was half in the bag and happy just watching the game, into putting the lights up. He grabbed them out of the box that they were stored, tossed them onto the evergreen, plugged them in, and said to himself "that should shut her up."
O, for heaven’s sake. Not everything needs to be a big PSYCHOLOGICAL…SOCIOLOGICAL…POLITICAL thing. Some things can just be nice, fun even.
Suddenly, I'm the Scrooge?
No, not suddenly
I like it and would happily participate (and contribute to the bill).
Up north here in Vancouver, November is a dark, dreary, cold, wet month and it feels quite depressing. Then, suddenly the Christmas season starts and the colorful lights brighten my surroundings and the year feels so much less dreary. It almost feels festive and cheerful.
EAB- that sounds like a great neighborhood!
Rodgers Forge is a couple miles from Hampden, which has been doing this for decades. Someone's faking their organic.
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