Christmas Decorating Etiquette: Feedback Friday

Welcome new and continuing readers alike to another edition of Feedback Friday, the feature that features you. We're currently standing at an ever-increasing 1,480 Facebook friends. That's over 30 since the beginning of the month! Please, if you enjoy getting local info and being part of the conversation, let your friends know to "like" us. As a thanks, here are some highlights of what our readers said over the past week:

Overheard on H-F Patch Facebook 

Earlier in the week, we posed a simple question to our Facebook friends: Is it a smart idea to already have your Christmas house decorating done or is it outright insane? The responses range across the spectrum:

• "That's crazy. Enjoy thanksgiving, digest the food and THEN decorate."
• "The electric company is happy"
• "I wish we had Christmas lights on our houses from November through February...it would make it all a bit brighter through the LONG winter months...just my opinion...:)"
• "Insane"
• "I watch my husband up on our roof in the ice and the cold, he comes down with his knuckles cracked from the wind... I wish he had gotten his butt up there when it was 70 out. That's not to say I'd want to start giving all that extra dough to the electric company just yet, though!"
• "Smart very smart"
• "putting the lights up and turning them on are different issues"
• "insane!"
• "Yes I think you can put them up after halloween but don't turn any decorations on until black friday or after."
• "Crazy!"
• "Was it Bob? Lol"
• "Smart! The weather was perfect for putting up lights this weekend. However, I would not turn them on until after Thanksgiving."
• "Proactive, my tree is going up this weekend, and will be turned on !"
• "Watch out for the angry pilgrim."
• "I like to give each holiday their due. Some of the stores have been decorated for Christmas for weeks now. Poor Thanksgiving."
• "Insane"
• "As long as they are not 'on' yet; proactive. I don't do ladders and roofs well in the cold and/or ice..."
• "insane."
• "Insane"
• "Completely nuts!"
• "It was 70 on Sunday so I proudly put mine up and turned them on. I figured people will only talk about it for two weeks. I'm glad to hear someone else did it."
• "Crazy!"
• "Very efficient and done by a clever person who took advantage. of the warmer weathe"
• "Proactive."
• "What's wrong with that? Is the house of the ppl who put em up! What's everyone's deal! Let them be! Worry about ur $$$ n house!"
• "I'll be jealous when I'm putting mine up on an icy ladder with frozen fingers! I personally wouldn't light them until after Thanksgiving, but people should do as they please with their own house!"
• "I have some people around the block from me whose house I walk by most nights with my dogs and had a very creative tableau for Halloween, with creepy things dangling from the trees, etc... I was charmed by it (and wish now I'd bothered to take pictures) but the very DAY after Halloween I walked by and it was already transmogrified into kind of a Christmas hell. The difference between the subtle and genuinely startling Halloween decorations (which included some ghostly low-level lights fading in and out randomly around the ground in their front-yard garden; very cool...) and the garish and obvious (not to mention thoroughly unoriginal) Christmas ones was striking. I'm pretty sure different people in that house have differing levels of talent in that area - not least because the Halloween decorations went up maybe a week or 10 days before the actual day (a sensible period of time, in my opinion), and these went up literally overnight the very day after Halloween, when very few houses start putting them up until around Thanksgiving. It was kind of disappointing. I'm glad to say only a couple of houses have Christmas stuff up yet. To my mind, it's really tacky to begin doing that kind of thing until after Thanksgiving, no matter what the reasoning behind it."
• "I will say the wisdom of getting your lights in place while the weather is still good is unassailable, but please leave them off until later in the season!"
• "Over done"
• "Unfair to my favorite holiday!!"

Thanks again to all our friends for your continued readership and support.