Given how shitty 2020 has been, I think I need a little Christmas cheer early this year. Lights and tree are going up on Black Friday, at least a week early for me.
What say you all?
EDIT: also, post music/movie/TV show recommendations for those less holiday inclined.
Music: ‘Socks’ by JD McPherson
Movie: Home for the Holidays (1995), dir. Jodie Foster
I have one of those laser lights that projects green and red dots on you house. And your neighbor’s house. And at low flying planes…
And tube lights. And various candy canes and tinsel garlands. The wife does it.
At least we don’t have to climb a ladder on soft soil. That was fucked.
2 days ago, cause, yeah, we need some cheering as we’re unlikely to have much safety gathering either.
But we don’t have thanksgiving here.
If anyone is upset about no Macy’s parade this year (like I am), here’s a link to last year’s parade , but the footage isn’t broadcast footage with all of the bullshit singing and crap like that. It’s a feed from the West Side, taken from the curb as if you’re watching the parade in person. This is what I’ll queue up on Thanksgiving morning.
Thank you for that. I’ll decorate for Christmas after Thanksgiving, but I’ll spend Thanksgiving with my sister and she always loved the parade. I’ll put this up on a big screen and it will make her smile.
I have complete my holiday mix for the year. You can download this year (and previous year’s) at https://davidshort6.wixsite.com/decembertunes Socks is on…last year’s mix. Great tune.
I meant the entire album, not just the song. It’s a fantastic collection.
My wife is already talking about it. Has been for weeks. I’m like:
Everything will go up Thanksgiving week as she has the whole week off. Yay.
Over the past few years we’ve been awful about this, rarely getting stuff up until a week or so before the 25th. This year, with the new baby, we at least want to get up some lights over the Thanksgiving holiday. He really likes lights. I suspect he’ll be whole new motivation to actually engage with the holiday for many, many years. When it was just us it was hard to find motivation.
We usually put the Christmas Tree up the day after Thanksgiving and take it down mid January. Though now that we live in a small condo I can see my wife wanting to take the tree down sooner to get the space back.
“Studies show that people who decorate, whether it’s early or later, have a sense of childlike euphoria and happiness and so it is not a bad thing to necessarily go ahead and decorate early, especially with everything going on in the world today and as much trouble were having in our own lives. It would help us have a better sense of wellbeing” said Rebecca Ward with the Joplin National Alliance on Mental Health.
I’ve never been home for the holidays so even if I were the decorating type I wouldn’t bother. But I’m not.
This year will probably be an exception, granted.
I have always loved Christmas. When I was a kid the tradition became to decorate the day after Thanksgiving. It was originally later I think but I coaxed my dad to start/let me start earlier each year. Thanksgiving was a hard limit though. It was only later I realized how hard it was for him. He didn’t like Christmas due largely, I think, to a crappy childhood.
I usually still decorate for Christmas even though it’s just me. This year will be late because I’m in dissertation hell. But I applaud everyone who decorates whenever they want!
Louie Anderson’s dad still needs to take down Mrs. Stillman’s Christmas lights. : )
Every Thanksgiving my family binge watches Life with Louie. The episodes are usually on Youtube if you search around. Never understood why the show was ever up for sale in DVD or digital.
My friend put their tree and decorations up on November 1st. Meanwhile, my girlfriend and I don’t really do Christmas so we’ll see whether we can muster the energy to go into the loft to get everything down…
Yes, but they drive everyone around them mad.
We’ll continue our tradition of putting things up on Christmas Eve, which we pretend is a conclusion-of-advent tradition but really started because we’re lazy lumps.
Never do Xmas before December, son is 14 on the 08/12 (12/8 for the US). Stuff goes up after that so he has a birthday not dominated by Xmas.
Personally I have had enough of the Decorations and tree by the 31st of December so 3 weeks is enough for me.
I might be driving my neighbors crazy this year. I didn’t do much last year because I just moved in, and this year there is no big family dinner so decorating might just be the dose of holiday magic needed.
There has been a few articles about putting things up earlier for happiness reasons.
We used to decorate like mad for both Halloween and Christmas, but had stopped doing that for the last few years. This year, we went heavy on Halloween again. I just finished getting that stuff back into storage and now my wife wants to start on the Xmas stuff. I have to replace an outdoor light fixture on Sat which involves cutting siding and installing a new electrical box, and hang a garage storage rack on Sunday, but after that, we are going full-on bling.
Oh, this is only for inside. Outside we keep simple because taking stuff down in early January can be tough if the weather is not cooperating.
Sunny, and a VERY unseasonable 60-ish degrees today (Tuesday it was in the 30s), so I think I’ll Griswold up the front of the house when I get home in an hour or so. I’ve already got my retro ceramic-style LED bulbs going across our front porch gutter, but I think I’ll mix in the strings of incandescent bulbs I’ve got around the porch itself to really make it pop.