The adage has always been, “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.” No one in the history of the universe has ever said, “I’m dreaming of a blue, orange, red, yellow, green and pink Christmas.” Multicolored Christmas lights could not be cornier.
Don’t get me wrong — I respect the candy cane red and white décor, the pops of green and even occasionally some blue to highlight the cold and icy vibe of the December holiday. My hatred is for the lights that look like someone decorated their house with the gumdrops and jellybeans leftover from gingerbread decorating.
The most convenient thing about holiday decorating is that the commercial world has holiday color schemes. Halloween is orange and purple, Valentine’s Day is red and pink, St. Patrick’s Day gets green and orange and so on. So, who in their right mind would see Christmas in its well-organized red, green and white fashion and say, “I think I should get these crazy-looking multicolored lights just to spice it up?”
Multicolored Christmas lights are overwhelming and chaotic. When I drive past a house decorated with multicolored lights, I automatically assume that the people living there are embracing their weirdness for the world, and I would rather not bear witness.
If you want to be wacky for Christmas, that’s your business. Don’t make it my problem by having me suffer through your bad lighting decisions every time I drive by.
White lights are classy. They leave room for other decorations to shine, like a leg lamp or some cute little light-up reindeer, even a nativity if you’re feeling traditional.
When it comes to decorating the tree, white lights are the most versatile. If you start with a green tree and white light base, the possibilities are endless. You can embrace the classy or embrace the funky. The white lights don’t define the tree.
My family has decorated two trees for the last five years. One tree is adorned with bows, ribbons and multi-packs of blue, white and silver ornaments, topped with an angel in pastel blue. The other is covered in all the random ornaments we have collected over the years — the family pictures, the Disney characters and the kindergarten art projects.
White lights are necessary for this kind of diversity. If we used multicolored lights on the classy tree, it would lose its stylistic poise. If we used multicolored lights on the family history tree, it would be overwhelming and scary.
Southern Living Magazine agrees with me. According to their article on white versus multicolored Christmas lights, “Colored lights are so vibrant that they can decorate a tree independently. No ornaments are required.” Let me know if you know anyone who wants a lights-only tree. I’ll wait.
Ornaments are the best tree decorations. My memories of decorating the tree include my sister and me waiting for my dad to finish struggling to put up the lights so we could do all the ornaments. My family hates putting the lights on the tree, so much so that my parents bought a pre-lit tree last year (the lights can be white or multicolored, but we always choose white).
I don’t know how multicolored lights fell into the hands of overly exuberant decorators, but I hope people move on from these monstrosities soon. My eyes hurt. Please stop.
White lights picture by Tessa Rampersad on Unsplash.