Who Still Has Christmas Lights Up?

I do a lot of driving around, and it spawns many of my stories here. That is the case today, as we ponder when exactly it becomes strange that you still have the Christmas lights up.

I got these pictures in a 3 sq mile area of Plymouth and Bourne. I'm sure that this article could have 50 pictures if I felt like wasting a night plowing through Suburbia with my camera. I took every single picture after Martin Luther King Day.

Before we even discuss this, I want it on the record that I'm not making fun of these people. To the contrary, I admire them. They are holiday honey badgers... they go where they want to, and they don't give a uffffffff. When you and I have let go of Christmas 2016, they are still plugging in the lights for another night of 2017 holiday cheer.

We took a peek at who had the Christmas lights up early, and "prior to Veterans Day" seems to be the Mendoza Line for "when roaming journalists with nothing to write about might take notice of your property." Likewise, the holiday for Dr. King- a man of peace, who somehow still paid a soldier's debt- is a pretty good cutoff point for "that same journalist is now outside your house, aiming a camera."

Sorry about the blurry pics. I keep odd hours, much like a werewolf, and I'm a large and menacing person to see stopping his car in your yard and getting out. I'm actually a fun and goofy guy, but you won't know that when you see me doing my thing in your yard out of nowhere at 5 AM. Anyhow, I just snap-shotted this picture, hence the Blurry.

Even if you like a nice Veterans Day to Jesus Day to MLK Day light show, MLK Day was Monday. I'm publishing this on Wednesday. Leaving the lights up until Groundhog Day (and we're closer to that than we are to Christmas) makes it more likely that he sees his shadow, and having them up on Valentine's Day makes it more likely that you'll be sleeping on the couch.

Part of it is the holiday weekend. With an extra day off, you really should have created some time to get out there and yank the lights down. Your next holiday is President's Day, and that is some time away, player.

In case you're wondering, the Twelve Days Of Christmas are generally thought to begin with Christmas and end on January 5th. January 5th is also known as Tomorrow Minus Two Weeks. If you put the lights up during Veterans Day weekend and leave them up until a week from Friday, you'll have done the Twelve Weeks Of Christmas. I do have some votes for the Epiphany, which is January 8th.

Many people on Cape Cod and other coastal regions use string lights on their decks and porches all year, but this tends to be more secular and less holiday-driven. There are those who say that those lights are there to help beach-walkers find their way home, especially if they have been drinking.

Another secular thing claimed by Cape Cod are the Christmas-looking red and green exterior lights.... which are actually some sort of nautical thing telling you which way you're supposed to drive around a channel buoy or something.

One of my pictures comes from a construction company near the Cedarville Marylou's. The house picture is from Plymouth Road, in Bourne. I'll be watching each property, as they are on the coffee run route from my house. One of them is going to cave in first and take their Christmas lights down.

Nothing other than just who that will be interests me right now.

Merry Christmas From Cranberry County Magazine

We're just stopping in to wish you and your family the happiest of holiday seasons.

Doing a lonely 12 hour shift Christmas at the hotel, but I have my tree for company. 

No, I don't know why we have both a star and an angel. My guess is that we had not one but two tree topping ornaments, we let them fight it out, and the angel won. The angel's victory may have involved Divine Might, but it also my have been influenced by how much cord we had for the star.

I seem to recall the angel standing alone, perhaps on my desk, last year. It just goes to show you that, even if you ride the bench or sing in the chorus, circumstances might put you up on top of the tree someday. I'd say that it's sort of like A Star Is Born, but that might offend the actual star in the photo. It's also sort of like Rudolph's story, but Rudolph doesn't fare too well in today's column (see below), so we'll just move on to the next tangent.

The housekeepers (from India) sense that I may be a bit sad about spending Christmas alone in an empty hotel like Jack Torrance, so they have been trying to cheer me up without speaking English by showing me pictures of the mango farm they own back home. 

 While we don't like to throw our weight around, we do feel an obligation to let you know that Santa saw fit to give drone strike capacity to Cranberry County Magazine. It's, like, in the back of the bag.

Belmont Circle rotary, Buzzards Bay.... Bourne likes blue nights at night, I like blue lights at night, but my camera has no love at all for blue lights at night.

Somebody in Marsh Vegas is getting coal in their stocking this year.

When you hang Rudolph in effigy, especially when you do so after slitting Rudolph's throat so that the blood doesn't spoil the meat, it moves you right up the Naughty List in Spring-Heel Jack style leapfrog bounds.. This dude is getting nothing for Christmas this year, but that matters little to a well-motivated man with a rifle and 250 pounds of fresh, infmaous venison. 

Is he vomiting up Hot Tamales? That's kind of cool, actually.

Still, ain't no one tryin' to see that on Christmas...

OK, almost no one... 

Bumbles went out like a sucker in his only TV appearance, and isn't above holding a grudge. There may be blood on those paws for all we know, and a stench that all of the perfumes of Arabia couldn't, uhm, de-stench. 

This is a personal grudge of mine, and I may be on an island here.... but does anyone merit his own spinoff Christmas special more than Bumbles does? The friggin' Little Drummer Boy has a special, as does Dominick the Italian Christmas Donkey. Bumbles is suffering mad holiday disrespeck!

I could write a Bumbles holiday special in 45 minutes if there was a check waiting and I had access to high-grade marijuana. I'd have him rampaging through the Yukon, swallowing Eskimo children whole, before getting the Christmas spirit and switching teams at the coda. It'd be like A Christmas Carol , but with major plot elements lifted from both War Of The Gargantuas and 30 Days Of Night.

If The Right People Were Running Plymouth....

Plymouth has a lot going for it. They have miles of coastline. They are dripping with history. They have an active downtown area. They have hotels and tourist-type places.

Plymouth also owns Thanksgiving. Her rule there is undisputed. There is no number one contender to that title. Plymouth owns it outright.

They take advantage of it. Pilgrims and Wampanoags are used to advertise businesses, decorate homes, and to generally set the mood of the community.

Just this past weekend, I went to a wonderful Thanksgiving parade that brought in locals by the thousands. All of those people spent money in the local economy, and Plymouth was the happening spot for a day.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I'd like Plymouth to happen a little harder.

Nothing burns the frontal lobes of a writer with nada in the pipeline than an underutilized resource.

You might think that my feelings on this are greedy and perhaps even crazy. They are definitely not in tune with the spirit of the season.

Thanksgiving is about being happy with what you have, not about thinking "How can I make money?" and so forth. There admittedly are some errors in my argument when viewed from that viewpoint.

However, a rising tide lifts all boats that don't have a big hole punched in the bottom. You can always be thankful, but you can always also be More thankful.

Here are a few ideas I have that might get this town on a payin' basis. We have a lot of nuclear reactor money to make up.

Thanksgiving Football

Is there anything that compelling beaming out of ESPN on, say, a holiday Thursday? Why not make the Plymouth North/Plymouth South Thanksgiving football game be a national event?

A big part of Thanksgiving lore in America involves going to the holiday high school football game, either the one where you went to high school at or the one in the town your kids go to school in. I'm about five years from having to make a very painful Duxbury-to-Bourne switch when my kid finally gets School Spirit.

ESPN should show a game. Sure, if they get one from Texas where they have 300 pounders all along the offensive line and the cornerbacks run a 4.4, and that would get you a higher level game. However, a lot of the charm is lost if it looks too much like a pro game, especially if they play it at one of those Texas schools with the 50,000 seat stadiums and the History textbooks that end with Jimmy Carter in the White House.

I would instead radically re-design the football stadium for one of the schools, or perhaps even build a stadium on a neutral site. I'd put it near the sea, preferably near wherever the Pilgrims actually set foot ashore.

There are a lot of woodlands around the nuclear reactor (if you ever want to see a satellite view of suburban sprawl coming to a skidding halt on either side of something, do a Google Map of the Pilgrim nuclear power plant), maybe they could build it in there.



Thanksgiving Stadium (my idea, I'll name it) would have less than 50,000 seats, but would possess several interesting visual facets:

- A giant replica Mayflower III on the seaside wall of the stadium, craftily positioned so that it would look like it was floating with the right camera angles. When either team scored, it could wobble back and forth as if in surf, while Rock The Boat (Don't Tip The Boat Over) plays on the loudspeakers.

- A complete recreation of a Pilgrim and a Wampanoag village in either end zone.

- A much better version of Plymouth Rock. I would use the largest boulder that can be moved by modern machinery,and make it be the non-sea-side wall of the stadium. I'd use a Disney-style fake rock if moving a small mountain became problematic.

- This Plymouth Rock would be hollowed out enough that the "1620" can be lit with fire or plasma rays. If we could somehow project the 1620 onto the moon, I'd be a-ight with that.

- A completely functional and life-sized lighthouse, which admittedly may be redundant with the 1620 neon sign.

- A seven hundred foot Turkey Of Vengeance robot who bursts forth from the sea to seek dinner-related vengeance on the crowd. We'd stop him before he killed too many people, of course.

Once we have the stadium in place, we'd need to get the schools up to speed.

We don't need to have the kids playing pro-level football, but it can't look like a Pop Warner game. Top coaches should be brought in, players from other schools should be lured in and the phys-ed classes K-12 should be hyper-intensified. I would not be put off by Soviet Union/Red Army comparisons.

We'd have to re-mascot the schools, as well. North could be the Pilgrims, South would be the... OK, this gets touchy.

"Wampanoags" is sort of a mouthful. "Indians" seems almost like a slur. "Sachems" lacks brand name recognition, and I think Middleboro or someone may already be the Sachems. "Warriors" is a bit bloody-minded. "Squantos" has a ring to it, although there was only one Squanto and we'd be heading into Lone Rangers territory. "Natives" sounds like what the Tea Party would name a team if they had one.

I suppose we could go Team Standish vs Team Alden, for the Massasoit Trophy. To be fair, Team Metacom vs Team Wamsutta for the Mayflower Trophy also works.

We'd also have to get the cheerleaders to step up their game. I'm thinking this, and this.

In turn for pretty much handing them their holiday viewing (and  30 for 30 special, or whatever they call those) for every Thanksgiving, ESPN will see that Plymouth gets a little financial compensation.

Compensation would be in order. I'm not sure that "free publicity" means much to a town that is in the early chapters of every American History textbook, Likewise, nationally televised stadium advertising would be limited, as very few people in Chicago are going to be ordering delivery from The Pizza Factory on Home Depot Road in America's Hometown.

No, Plymouth will be requiring little green pieces of paper with Founding Father Faces.

America would adopt the game as their own. It might not sell out East where many are going to their own HS games, but it would be prime morning viewing for anyone a time zone or three over.

Thanksgiving Parade

Speaking of compulsory national Thanksgiving viewing, we could make some improvements to the Thanksgiving parade and get it up on the tube.

Macy's has a Thanksgiving parade. Philadelphia and Detroit also have prominent Thanksgiving parades. New York was an Algonquian trading post with 5000 Lenape natives when the first Thanksgiving was held in 1621. Why should they have the Thanksgiving parade?

F*** them.

The Thanksgiving parade held in Plymouth should be televised nationally. The Macy's parade gets 88 million eyes a year. It is a national tradition that the much smaller Plymouth has little chance of vanquishing.

Plymouth could work some odd angle for their parade, to distinguish it from the giant Macy's parade that we have no chance of defeating straight up.

The Macy's parade starts at 9 AM, and ends about when the North/South football team would be starting. We'd be fools to run opposite of that.

Why not try the night before, or even Thanksgiving night?

7 PM, either night. I like the Thursday night idea better, as we'd be trying to wedge in between the 4 PM NFL game and the 8:30 PM game. We'd have all of the vacationers in town already, as opposed to a Wednesday night event.

We'd have to weed out the weaklings among the parade attractions. We'd have to hunt up corporate sponsorship, which could be used to super-power the floats.

We'd have to consider altering the parade route. I like Benny's as much as the next person doesn't, but it's not the place for a Jump Off. I'm thinking of using 3A, maybe make the parade run from Plimoth Plantation to Plymouth Rock. That may also prove problematic. but we can sweat the details later.

The important part is the ending, which is also why Thursday night is crucial to the parade.

Plymouth is already the home of Thanksgiving. Why not also take the running-unopposed title for Black Friday?

That's right... go from humbly thanking the Gods for what you have to the Gimme Gimme Gimme of the Christmas shopping season. It's the most important day of the consumer year, and no one owns it.

Plymouth could take possession of Black Friday simply by already having the eyes of the nation on them already via the football game and the parade. End that parade at Plymouth Rock, and light a mammoth Christmas tree there.

A simple, symbolic act, lighting that tree. It will match the neither Rockefeller Center tree, nor even the Boston tree. However, what it lacks in prestige, it makes up for in timing. Tied to the Thanksgiving parade, at a slack hour between football games.... Boom.

Why let Barry steal our thunder?

Granted, I'm aiming high, with stadiums and new holidays and all. Plymouth should aim high. If we don't, someone might come along and take Thanksgiving from us. New York already has the nationally televised parade that by all rights should belong to Plymouth.

We can take it back, if we Think Big.

Whether that makes enough money to pay for the effort remains to be seen. I'm more of an idea guy than a bean counter. The bean counters would have the hard job.

However, if Plymouth has a chance to profit heavily off of a holiday that they already own, and if they have a chance to claim a second holiday, would they not be wise to look into the best case scenario?