Is the guy that keeps his Christmas lights on his house year round the biggest white-trash loser on the block or is he just way smarter than everyone else? Did you know that once you spend more than $24.95 on any single holiday decoration that you can never throw that item away, even if it stops lighting up or emits smoke or is dented and bedraggled after seventeen hard cold winters? It’s true.

If your forty-year-old son made a candy cane out of construction paper and cotton balls when he was in kindergarten, were you aware that, according to Decoration Law, you are obligated to display that candy cane beginning on the day after Thanksgiving for the rest of your life? That’s a fact.

Did you ever give a small boy, a toddler, a Christmas ornament as a present? What’s he supposed to do with it? Is he supposed organically know that he should be collecting ornaments – starting on the day he is born – so he will have thousands of ornaments to put on his own tree when he grows up? Is he expected to be excited each year to put his own ornaments on the tree? Is it possible that he doesn’t give a shit about ornaments? Nope, not possible. In fact, I have been told that everyone likes ornaments and wants lots of their very own.

Did you know that a holiday decoration needs to be stored in its original box until the cardboard starts to decompose? Yep. And when the corners begin to turn to dust you reinforce them with a half a roll of Duct Tape and when the Ducts wear out you need to try SuperGlue, hot glue guns, staples, binder clips and anything else you can think of to save the fuckin’ original box.

Every year you have to buy at least seven new strands of lights. It’s a rule. But you can’t throw the old lights away … they might come back to life! The half a strand that worked this year may turn into three-quarters of a strand by next year. The list of things to put lights on goes up every year, so for chrissakes, don’t throw away any lights! New objects to wind Christmas lights around are being discovered every day – put some lights on the basketball net, wind them around the hose, what about the dog’s house? I know you need to drive that truck to work but it’s gonna sit in the driveway all weekend, light that fuckin’ thing up!

You can never have too many ornaments. Again, you have to buy new ones every year but none of the old ones can ever go away. They all have sentimental value. Every single ornament is the genesis for an hour-long argument about where and what year it came from. I know people who have moved multiple times because their house had become too small to hold the Christmas ornaments. They don’t sell trees big enough to hold even half of the Christmas ornaments you have. Shit, you could go to the Sequoia National Forest and decorate the tallest fuckin’ tree you can find and still come home with thirteen full boxes of ornaments.

Every electrical outlet inside and outside of the house has some type of Christmas light plugged into it. The electric meter outside is spinning so fast and making a whining noise so loud that you have to turn the volume up on the TVs. The extension cords are crisscrossing the lawn in a pattern so thick that it looks like the map that shows the destinations Southwest Airlines flies to. You own every possible kind of connector adapter and dozens of those multi-point surge protectors. This is the third year in a row that you ran a long extension cord and plugged it into one of your neighbor’s outside outlets. You hope that fucker never finds out.

The Christmas spirit may be dead, but no one can kill the decorations (still, we have to keep trying).

Photo credit: GE0pdx on Visual Hunt / CC BY-ND