Every year I’m confused by Christmas tree lights. There’s always at least one setting on them I don’t understand. The appeal of the others is easy to see; there’s the static lights, the gently fading in-and-out lights, the alternating between green-and-blue and yellow-and-red.
But one setting has the following sequence: twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, RAVE. I mean, these lights go bat-shit crazy.
It’s like having several ambulances parked inside the living room.
I do not get the appeal of this setting. It lures you into a false sense of security and then unleashes hell upon you.
It’s not a mode you could leave on while you were trying to watch the TV or read; it would be as conducive to concentration as the middle of the motorway is to a good meditation session.
The only application I can see for this setting is if you’re in some kind of Home Alone situation and the burglars are epileptic.
I feel particularly sorry for poor Santa. If he came down the chimney on Christmas Eve and the lights were on that setting he’d get halfway through filling your stockings and then shit himself.
Maybe it’s a quirk of electrical engineering? Maybe electricity just works in a certain way, and in order to get the good patterns you also have to get the ones that look like you’re trying to signal a plane?
Or maybe those settings are amazing, and I’m just weird. How I feel about something and its objective worth aren’t connected.
It’s likely that, as I write this, somewhere in the world someone has the exact same range of Christmas lights and Program 3 is their favourite setting.
They’re sitting there, alternating between being lulled to sleep and fending off a seizure, and they’re having a great time.
It may be the most Christmassy thing about Christmas in their eyes.
And sometimes when they turn those lights on they accidentally end up on Program 5, the ‘gentle twinkle’, and when that happens they think to themselves, ‘What kind of bland, vacuous idiot can stand to watch this dull blinking all throughout December?’
The answer, you’ll be proud to know, is me.
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Header photo by Svetozar Cenisev on Unsplash
