The time has come to take down your Christmas lights

How to say this.

Hmmm.

Remember those old commercials for, what was it? Deodorant? Mouthwash? The one that said “If your best friend won’t tell you, who will?”

Think of this as a message from a best friend.

We just passed Valentine’s Day and the President’s Day weekend is upon us. Crocuses are about to erupt from the earth and leaves are ready to explode on the trees. Spring is coiled like a can of fake peanut brittle in unwitting hands. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to baseball training camps in Arizona and Florida, for crying out loud.

Don’t you think it might be time to turn off and take down the Christmas decorations? Wait much longer and you’re going to have to mow around those lawn ornaments.

And don’t think we’ve overlooked those few who still have cornstalks and pumpkins adorning the entry way – it’s just that Mother Nature is rapidly turning those ornaments into a healthy mulch for the flower bed. Those things don’t need to be taken down. They need to be composted.

Back to the Christmas decorations.

Haven’t they been up since November – right after the Halloween decorations came down? Aren’t 14 or 15 weeks of Christmas enough? The song only talks about 12 days of Christmas, right?

It took a lot of creativity to create that pastiche in red and green, to meld the candy canes, the animatronics, the religious symbolism, the pop-culture balloon creatures and the exiles from The Nutcracker into a modern suburban setting.

Why not adapt that creativity anew.

Here are a few suggestions, just in case actually taking them down is too much of an imposition:

By now, those lighted candy canes just look silly. So, at least paint them white, raise them up and pretend they’re Bo Peep’s staff – especially if the reindeer are starting to look a little woolly along side.

If you still have blow-up Frosty the Snowman going in the yard, turn him around and have him moon the street and call him Randy Moss. If you aren’t going to take down that automated reindeer, at least train some ivy so it can look like an English topiary And, to be anatomically correct, it really is about time for Rudolph, Prancer or Dancer to shed those antlers.

If you aren’t going to take down the Christmas lights, set them to run in sequence, like a Las Vegas billboard, and hold a huge Texas Hold ‘em tournament.

If you’re not going to take the lights out of the trees, light them up in parallel lines and pretend they’re landing lights for the birds.

If you aren’t going to take Santa’s sleigh down off the roof, at least go up and tip it on one end and wrap it with yellow police tape so that you can pretend that Santa crash-landed and the site is a crime scene. If you’re going to keep wooden soldiers standing out front, at least hang an Ichiro jersey on them and have them hold a baseball bat.

Admittedly, it gets a little depressing to think about Christmas once the holiday bills start rolling in after the first of the New Year. But do you really need those lighted reminders staring at you every night when the sun goes down?

Look, it’s come down to this: Either get creative with those Christmas decorations or risk an intervention from the concerned folks at Home & Garden TV – or worse, Queer Eye for the Straight House.