Festive Lights Should Remain Up Throughout The Wintertime

By Kelly Conaboy January 3, 2017

A polite demand.

The holidays have ended and Donald Trump is going to be president very soon. The President of the United States. Oh, my god. Donald Trump. The President of the United States. President Donald Trump. Mike Pence. Nazis. Deportation. Nuclear war. It hasn’t even started yet.

Anyway festive lights should remain up throughout the winter.

Wouldn’t that be nice? I don’t mean holiday lights outside of homes, necessarily, or giant blow-up penguins who pop out of a thing and wave at you, though I do like those. I mean lights on the street, and on trees, and lights around the window frames of businesses, and maybe also inside of businesses. OK? It’s not a mandate. Businesses can do whatever they want, but I do suggest in the strongest of terms that they do what I say regarding festive lighting.

(Or even decorations that aren’t lights, for the inside of businesses. I was in a place recently that had sort of…pine branches and twine strung up all over the ceiling. I loved it. It was much better than if it had been just a plain shitty ceiling with nothing.)

Why festive lighting throughout winter? Well, the answer is obvious but for the sake of giving you something to look at online, I’ll tell you. Winter is cold and dark and we live in a nightmare that is going to get worse. People are depressed and scared and angry and often women have to have periods and men never do, not even once in their lives. We’re getting older and one day we’ll be dead, though that probably will not be “of old age.” The things that used to make us happy are no longer enough, or maybe they never were, I forget. And it’s so cold outside, especially at night. Even inside it’s cold! And dark. Night is darker in winter. Your summer lighting setup is not capable of properly handling winter darkness, neither inside nor out. Meaning inside of our homes nor outside of our homes and also inside of our minds nor outside of our minds. So I think we should have the lights.

The lights will make it nicer when we’re outside and can see them. They will bring a little bit of joy and make it seem like our world is magical and romantic, which it isn’t, but pretending it is is better than living in an unmagical and unromantic world that doesn’t even seem magical and romantic due to lighting. It would be nice. Lights! In other seasons you can rely on Earth to make itself look nice, but in winter, unless it has just snowed or is currently snowing, you have to help it by putting lights on it.

🙂

You might think that leaving holiday lights up on city streets would seem odd post-holidays, but it won’t and I’ll tell you why. Because the lights I’m talking about are mostly:

Snowflake related

Snowflake related festive lighting strung across city streets and affixed to lampposts is relevant all winter because snow is in winter. And what is snow? Snowflakes. I can sense now that even the most skeptical readers are coming around to my point of view. Also, when the lights are not snowflakes, the lights I’m talking about are:

Strings of lights that are just little bulbs

And that’s just pretty. A leafless tree with branches covered in bright little lightbulbs? Come on. Bright little lightbulbs framing a store’s window display? That doesn’t stop being pretty in January. It’s arguably even prettier now, because it’s the most pretty when it’s snowing and it’s going to snow more going forward than it did in December. It hardly snowed at all in December!!!!!!!! You see my point.

According to the New York Independent System Operator, the amount of energy spent statewide on New York’s holiday lighting is equivalent to the energy spent to power 800,000 homes. OK. Well I don’t remember anyone even asking them for this information.

What else? I feel like I’ve made my point pretty clearly. I guess a potential problem is that houses and business will keep holiday-specific decorations up, leaving us in an endless frozen Santa menorah nightmare. And also that they’ll keep those new lights going, the ones that are projected onto homes that move around and look crazy. That wouldn’t be ideal.

But I don’t know. Who cares?