You may know this, but I'm married to a Christmas decoration junkie. The cheer that my darling wife Diana brings to our house every year is amazing and unmatched. We have no less than four Christmas trees in our house. In fact, we bought this particular floor plan in part because we knew the railings along the second floor would be awesome to wrap in lighted garland. Our electrical usage increases by 800 watts when the lights are all on. We tell the Google "Merry Christmas" and all of it comes on at once. (We tell it "Happy New Year" to turn it all off.)
If you were anything like me in college, you probably had Christmas lights up in your dorm room, and probably all year. Sometimes I wonder why we don't do that in our adult life. OK, so it would look junky, lights duct-taped to the wall, I get it, but it still seems weird that we don't do something like it as adults. I sort of do, because I have a bunch of Philips Hue lights in my living room, and go to funky colors when I want. But the duration of decoration, that seems too short. People are really critical about that, with stores selling stuff before Halloween, but when you don't have a real winter, it's different in Central Florida.
This year, our first decorations went up on November 11, and I enthusiastically endorse this. By Thanksgiving, almost everything was up. The last items didn't come down until this week, about half way into January. So yes, we have Christmas decorations up for about two months, or one-sixth of the year, and we're not ashamed.
Now that it's all down, it's kind of sad in here. Actually, that's just because we're enduring some cold and rainy weather, but it does feel like something is missing. Our general decor is not strong. We're not minimalists or anything, but we're far from the type of people who need to put something on every horizontal surface and hand something on every square inch of wall. And while we could hire an interior decorator, that would make the place feel like a model home because it's not "us" stuff.
The good news is that it'll all be back out in ten months. And there might be one tree still hidden in plain sight.
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