We made it through Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Sofa Sunday (which, as far as I can tell is the actual event) and Cyber Monday. Technically, we haven’t made it through Cyber Monday yet. In fact, we are still reeling from the day. It is more like Terminator Monday come to kill us all. But, if we are lucky we will break on through to the other side.
Now we are on to the great, gaudy house lighting event, happening in neighborhoods all over the country.
There is a particular area I drive through where the lights go up so fast, the competition is so fierce, the quest for dominance boils into the street.
It starts with one house, a few strings of lights and a plastic Santa. Not to be outdone, the neighbor across the street adds a few reindeer and some extra lights. Soon, there are people renting scaffolding to string lights from the peak of the chimney. One person brought in a helicopter to place a giant plastic snowman on his house. The wind blew it over, where it crashed into the church manger scene. The Pastor was so furious he actually invoked an ancient Methodist curse on the house. Two days later a freak storm blew the whole thing away. Tithing went up immediately.
Pretty soon the whole street was lined with flashing blinking lights. Every house had a sign inviting passersby to tune into a particular FM station to enjoy the music that the lights were synced with. By the time you got to the end of the street you had gone from “Flight of the Valkyries” to “Jingle Bell Rock” to “We Are the Champions”.
There was enough flashing, blinking lights to trigger a seizure, enough radio transmissions to bring down a plane, and you could actually feel the climate change almost by the minute.
Local news heralded the neighborhood as one of the most festive in the city, and the thing went a little crazy. Everybody rushed to have more cheer than their opponents, as measured in megawatts.
“Where will it end?” Asked a little boy, walking to school one morning, as he looked at the lawn, it had started to grow again with all the light and heat.
“Some things never end.” His older sister replied. “Grownups never know when to quit.”
She sighed, took his hand and shuddered.
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