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#152

If you ever need to get a good sense of how unoriginal the general public is, just drive around suburban neighborhoods on a December evening and look at all the Christmas light displays. One house has strings of white lights around bushes and trees, another has colored lights hanging down from the drainpipes, and still another has a gaudy house outline thing going on. Every year there's a rush to put more lights up. The logical end to it all, of course, is to light up your neighborhood enough so that when the sun goes down in the evening, you don't notice. But how unrefined! It's not how many lights you have but how you use them that counts. Because I am a creative idealist (and not because I am poor and can only afford a limited number of lights), my Christmas light displays will be designed to employ lights in new ways rather than brainlessly piling more and more onto the pine out front until it starts photosynthesizing at night. For example, I think it would be neat to loop strings of lights around the car, plug them into the cigarette lighter, and drive around town really fast. To give equal time to our compatriots that live underground, I'd bury a string of lights in the yard, leaving only just enough for the end to plug in. The lonely power lines in the street go sadly unadorned, year after year. The best justification for hosting a Christmas party, besides to creep up behind the guests and suddenly blow party whistles in their ears, would be to booby trap the house with 200 watt Christmas lights and flip them on at opportune moments. "Why, Mr. Host, I never knew you had such a beautiful painting." "Why yes, Mr. Guest, and if you look very closely in this corner down here, yes, lean a little closer, that's right, then you can see...A REALLY BRIGHT LIGHT!" "Oh, Mr. Host, heh heh, that's very interesting. Um. My eyes are watering a lot now. I can almost see. Would you mind, very much, if I used your restroom?" "Why no, Mr. Guest, it's the second door on the left." "Thank you, Mr. Host, let's see, ah here, it is...*click*...where's the toilet?...oh, right here...crazy Mr. Host, dunno what asylum he escaped from...oh well, it's just once a y--OH NO, SOMEONE IS SHINING A FLASHLIGHT THROUGH THE WINDOW!"