Bah, Humbug? No, That's Too Strong.

I hate decorating for the holidays.

On the surface, this may be a very misleading statement. Truth be told, I love Christmas trees and Christmas lights and Christmas decorations. I love them so much that I start decorating for Christmas literally the day after Halloween, the earliest point allowed by law. By the time they start playing Christmas carols on the radio, I've already had my tree in the living room for a week and a half. That's how much I love the Christmas season.

The actual process of decorating is a serious drag, though. Lugging those big, heavy plastic totes out of the storage shed and up the stairs. Packing all our trinkets away for two months and switching them out with the appropriate seasonal décor. Applying all the window clings. It's a fairly long and involved process and it takes the better part of an entire day. Sometimes two days, because I have small children and they are time vampires by nature.

The worst part, by far, is the lights. I am now convinced that taking 200 tiny wax candles and successfully lighting them with a match would be easier than the electric lights I deal with every year. Oddly enough, I don't have the stereotypical problems that you see all the time on TV and hear about in radio commercials. I don't have jumbled balls of light strings that I have to untangle. (Indeed, my Christmas tree is artificial and conveniently prelit, so one of the biggest headaches of dealing with a genuine, authentic, live-until-you-chop-it-down tree are nicely circumvented.)

I seem to have the same problem every year. I take the lights out of the box, test them to ensure that they work, but as soon as I go to the trouble of wrapping them around the bannister or framing them around the window or hooking them to the deck railing, as soon as I plug them in under real-life conditions, they invariably will not work. The whole point of a test-plugging is supposed to eliminate the frustration of going to all the trouble to hang them only to find that I've completely wasted my time, but apparently the lights available on the market today are far too smart for that. They see right through my clever ploy. They wait until I've spend half an hour arranging them just so before they begin their annual, formal protest.

Determined to outsmart a string of electric bulbs, I will painstakingly and systematically remove and test every single tiny bulb. Each one is only about 0.4 watts so I am operating on the premise that they are not significantly brighter than I am. I will replace fuses. I will, if so inclined, drive to the store and attempt to find a replacement that is identical in length and color to what I am currently using, because I picked the decorations I have for a reason. (Multi-colored lights are the bomb. Clear lights are boring. Anyone who tells you differently is delusional.)

I've even gone so far as to purchase a light tester, which is a gun-shaped device that makes little beeping noises if your lights are good, and makes little beeping noises if your lights are bad. You can also tell which lights are bad because they're the ones that don't light up. The use of this device frequently culminates in me pointing it at my own head and pulling the trigger.

I go to all this trouble, and in the end it's just temporary anyway; at the beginning of January, all the Christmas stuff goes back in a gigantic plastic tote and goes into storage for another ten months. That's usually about the length of time required for me to forget what a hassle this all is, in preparation for doing it all over again the following year. (In some ways, putting the decorations away is even more tragic, because you spend an entire day and don't even have anything to show for it. You do all that work just to make the house look... normal and boring.)

I acknowledge that planned obsolescence is all around us, but I despise that we live in a disposable society. Things should be made to last forever... or at least should be made to last more than one Christmas season. Maybe everybody else throws out their Christmas stuff and buys it new ever year, but this is not something I can comfortably fathom. For me, the only thing worse than putting up holiday decorations is shopping for holiday decorations!