Don't Make Me Pay For Christmas Lights

I like Christmas as much as the next guy, but I have to voice my objection to my town’s expenditures on holiday displays and celebrations. Route 52, for miles outside Hopewell Junction, has wreaths and lights on every power pole. The town has a ginormous Christmas tree at the main recreation center and a lighting ceremony. It bugs me that these things are paid for by money extorted by the threat of force from taxpayers. That it has been coercively organized and financed takes all the joy out of the decorations and events.

I have no objection to wreaths and trees and the trappings of the season in the public square, but let these things be paid for by way of voluntary contributions rather than taxes. If I want to put lights on my house, I don’t send goons over to my neighbors and shake them down for money to do it. I ask that my fellow subjects of East Fishkill show me the same consideration.

I was in Manhattan Friday night for Mrs Vache Folle’s office soiree. A good time was had by all. Mrs VF’s company knows how to throw a party. The island is gussied up pretty nice for Christmas. I don’t know how much, if any, of this was publicly financed or installed by city “workers”. The spectacle almost made it worth fighting the traffic. I was almost homicidal by the time I got to the $43 parking lot, but the party cheered me in short order. I suppose you could make a case that public investment in lights and decorations brings in shoppers and tourists and benefits the public by increasing sales taxes paid. In my case, I was going to Manhattan whether it was decorated or not and I would just as soon that about a zillion of the other folks on the streets had stayed home instead of tooling around in taxis and limos and private cars.

There are a few folks in our town who have gone crazy with Christmas lights. God bless them, but I don’t know how they do it and where they keep all the plastic statuary the rest of the year. In Seattle, we lived next to a community, Olympic Heights, where almost every house was festooned with an excess of lights and decorations. The streets were packed with onlookers all December. The halls were decked and then some. Some denizens of Olympic Heights even hired actors or forced their children to play Santa Claus or other Christmas characters on their front lawns. It was all a lot of fun, I’m sure, but I am glad all the same that I lived outside the confines of the subdivision and had no peer pressure to decorate my house.

I tried to put some lights on some shrubs last year, but my heart was not in it. It smacked of effort, and I couldn’t work out how to plug them in without having wires in the way. Then there’s the whole taking the lights down thing and storing them. I just don’t have the time or the inclination or the extra storage space. I reckon that my commitment to sloth outweighs my Christmas spirit by a pretty good margin.