Watt's New?

Holiday lighting is cheery…up to a point.

Like everything else in America, it has been turned into an Olympic sport.  A few white lights on the tree outside used to be sufficient. Now, every other house is Disneyland. At the newspaper where I worked, the photographers went out to shoot the most spectacular displays, and we published a different picture or group of pictures for several weeks. Fortunately, we stopped short of awarding prizes.

A few spiders, skeletons and cobwebs got the job done for Halloween. Why do you need 500 lighted reindeer on your front lawn? I’m very glad to know there’s a happy – and well-heeled -- family living in your house, but geez Louise, when does artistic decoration turn into actual light pollution?

Is Dad outside on a ladder stringing these lights along the roofline himself? Of course not, there are companies that do this, and it’s a growing business.

Now I’m not a complete Scrooge. There are homeowners on certain streets who deliberately choose to go all-out and light everything up, publicizing it ahead of time, and welcome parades of cars through the neighborhood. I assume new homebuyers have to be told what’s expected of them if they move in. But if this is the way that street wants to share holiday cheer, have at it.

On the other hand, there are homeowners’ associations that turn into little police states. If you want to put colored lights on your outside tree, that’s a no-no, “We don’t do that here at Snotty Acres, white lights only, please.”

The good thing about this holiday season in the Northern Hemisphere is that thanks to the lights, we can see where we’re going in the dark, which is two-thirds of the day in the dead of winter. Anything that keeps us from slipping on black ice.