Christmas Close

It turns out that I have moved into Christmas Close.

1st of December, out came the European lightbulb mountain which was promptly stuck to the front of my neighbours houses. Our close glitters so much it's like someone covered us in glue and rolled us through Claire's Accessories.

I was considering how to react to this.

Would I...
a) Act the way I always do, wait until the 15th December (ish) and then put up my lovely tasteful tree the way I always do, whilst whistling along to White Christmas or whatever other "Christmas Classics" they have on TV

b) Go for the Ebeneezer option. Stick a dry twig in a pot, hang one solitary black bauble from it and stick the whole thing in the window. Buy one of B&Q's "festive" funereal wreaths for my front door. (Have you ever seen anything so inappropriate?)

c) Out-do everyone in the street by carrying out a cunning Italian-Job-type-ruse in Ford Fiesta in order to steal the Bon Accord's hideous singing Christmas Display Sodding MacHappy and Sodding MacHuggy (As beautifully rendered in this person's flickr - why Billy Connolly hasn't sued for defamation of character by now, I don't know) and staple it to my roof.

In the end I just went for option A. But - Drama! Dear readers! After years of not being able to use them in case the punters got confused by the red glow in the window, the sodding red tree lights finally gave up the ghost. We made a last minute trip in to town and went to B&Q who... had their blue LED lights on sale for LESS THAN A THIRD OF THE PRICE!!!

Delightedly, I grabbed some - thinking how well it would go well with my well coordinated Christmas colour scheme (Lawrence Llwellyn Bowen would have been really impressed, oh, about 3 years ago) - and wondering why on earth they'd reduce all these lovely blue bulbs!

I now know why. These things are so damn bright you could use them in an interrogation suite. I was thinking of getting eye laser surgery - but hey! I looked at my tree and now I've got 50/50 vision. If we ever need to really urgently communicate with aliens, I'm pretty sure we could use them to send morse code to reach far off depths of space...

I just had to switch off the pulse setting because the neighbours were complaining about all the aging ravers blocking up the street outside...