The Christmas season is a time for joy and wonder; however, after Christmas, the festive atmosphere has to be removed. Some argue about the latest way someone should keep their festive decorations up. The lights should go down sometime before the second week of January. This is the case because leaving up your lights for the end of the year makes the occasion more wondrous except the lights should be down the week after New Year’s Day.
To elaborate on why Christmas lights should be gone after New Year’s is because of the time. Christmas, in retrospect, is a de-spooked Halloween, with decorations that require electricity, tasty food and people knocking on your door. On Nov. 1, taking down your Halloween decorations should be the top priority but Christmas is an exception. This shouldn’t be the case because it’s the equivalent of leaving up Halloween decorations into November. It’s something that should also be changed, something else to consider would be the expenses.
Christmas decorations are expensive on their own however the price to have them on isn’t worth paying for. In an article from Addy Bink, in a recent survey, the average American spends $387 on Christmas decorations alone which is not considering the electricity cost.
A look into the cost is quite shocking between Dec. 25 and Jan. 8, which is two weeks, this isn’t considering that people will usually have their decorations put up after November. Taking this into consideration, that is six weeks. Six weeks is a lot of time to have your lights up considering that lights have a cost. In an article from Personal Finance & Money, they say that one hour of having lights can cost 12 cents adding up to $89.28 if those two weeks are added then it would be $120.96. This cost could rise, so taking down the lights before January can save you a few dollars.
In comparison to climate change, light pollution affects the environment however it isn’t discussed which could be an issue in the future when more homes and roads are constructed.
This last point is about the environment. Light pollution isn’t widely talked about however it’s pretty important, things like less starry skies are the visible ones. The problem is the health effects, fatigue, anxiety, headaches, and stress. These are a few problems with more lights in the sky, Christmas lights are even more destructive because they are left on for the majority of the day. Not to mention throwing out Christmas lights, in an article from Dumpster Discount, lights can take up lots of space in landfills, they also can negatively affect the environment because of the high amounts of lead and bromine in the lights.
Overall, the festive season has a lot of problems that aren’t talked about because no one pays attention to them because it isn’t very jolly to be negative during the festive season.
The holidays are usually when people care for others so more people should be on top of taking down their festive lights because clearer skies and health problems aren’t a fair trade-off for leaving up some plastic lights. Christmas lights appear to be small things that someone can forget about for a while, however, these colorful lights are more of a problem than anyone would expect. Taking downlights should be taken care of quickly.
