Christmas Part 3: LED Lights & The Search for Real Christmas

Unlike Starbucks cups, this is the real war on Christmas.

The real war on Christmas is the prevalence of LED Christmas lights.

Here’s the deal: Christmas lights are supposed to be warm and inviting and say “Hey, this is a season for friends and family and time together and it’d be great if you could stop in to say hi!”

Here’s what LED Christmas lights (especially white LED Christmas lights say): “Hey, we’ve turned our residence into a dimly-lit industrial warehouse that has burned-out lightbulbs, minimal staffing and probably some kind of asbestos.”

You know, just some holiday spirit.

What’s worse is that they’re touted as an upgrade from traditional, incandescent lights.

“They’re better than traditional lights – they’re energy efficient!”

Surprise real talk: they aren’t better. They’re horrible and sad.

After all, we’re creatures of comfort. No one wants to get together with a family member who’s like “Hey, I’m saving the earth with my energy-efficient lighting. Who wants to sit in the dim light of my space-ship lighting while we talk about how Aunt Mary is STILL hobbling around after she twister her ankle 3 months ago and how she’s probably faking it but no one can call her out on it because we only see her once a year so we need to pretend like we don’t know. In short, bad lighting makes a potentially-stressful time even MORE stressful because someone couldn’t have warm and inviting lights on their house.

But fear not! If you’ve mistakenly invested in LED Christmas lights, these are the steps I would recommend taking to remedy the situation and save your Christmas season:

1. Instantly remove any strands of the LED deception lights so that people won’t be afraid to approach your front door with Christmas cheer.
2. Turn a blind eye to the fact that LED lights are “energy efficient” and realize that they’re tiny little lights that don’t suck that much power (even the traditional ones). Saying that energy-efficient Christmas lights are important is like saying that turning up the speed of your ceiling fan in the summer will save you big bucks on your electricity bill (I’m from Arizona, so these are the kinds of things that we would care about). It’s marketing through and through.
3. Go get some incandescent Christmas lights so that you can celebrate Christmas the way it was meant to be celebrated. No sweat! And no one will have to be the wiser.

 

So, my friends, it’s with great anticipation that I look forward to seeing zero Christmas lights on your houses and also to writing the fourth and final installment of Christmas posts for the blog!

Merry Christmas in advance,

A Fellow Office Worker

Photo: NBC

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