If you strung your own Christmas lights, you were paid $6,000 after taxes

by philg

Merry Christmas Eve!

If you want to feel better about your economic situation, here is a crew stringing lights at a neighbor’s house:

“Is that the same company that strung lights for the HOA’s clubhouse?” I asked. “They told me that their minimum fee is $5,000.” The owner of the house responded, “We’re paying $6,000.”

So… if you strung your own lights this year, that’s like being paid $6,000 extra, after tax.

Merry Christmas, indeed!

Separately, how tough would it be to build a robot that could climb a tree trunk, secure the end of a light strand at the top, and then come down while wrapping the strand around the trunk? This is a common Christmas light display for cities, hotels, and houses. It is apparently an expensive job and, without a bucket truck, a risky one. Isn’t this ripe for automation and semi-autonomy?

If we can’t have robots to string our lights, how about reengineering the lights themselves so that we can get a higher return on investment from stringing them? Any given light string should have at least 10 different themes (light colors):

  1. Christmas (green and red)
  2. Thanksgiving (orange, red, and yellow?)
  3. Halloween (orange and purple)
  4. (for Californians and Ivy League students) #FreePalestine (white, green, red, black for the Palestine flag and/or spell out “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”)
  5. (for those practicing Jewcraft) Hanukkah (white and blue)
  6. Ramadan
  7. Eid al-Fitr
  8. Islamic New Year
  9. Holi (every color?)
  10. Chinese New Year (red, yellow, and green)

Loosely Related:

‘Cause I’m a redneck woman
I ain’t no high class broad
I’m just a product of my raising
I say, “hey ya’ll” and “yee-haw”
And I keep my Christmas lights on
On my front porch all year long

(“Redneck Woman”, by Gretchen Wilson and John Rich (not to be confused with abortion care and lockdown advocate Gretchen Whitmer!))

The final look of the professionally-lit house:

8 thoughts on “If you strung your own Christmas lights, you were paid $6,000 after taxes”

  1. Undoubtedly strung by all men, too. Gone are the days of Clark Griswold stringing his own lights. There are lots of interesting technology problems but unless they have the word of the month, they don’t exist.

    • lion: You raise a good point regarding gender equality. I’ve seen a lot of these professional light-stringers in the neighborhood, mostly using ladders to reach gutters and treetops. All have appeared to identify as “men”.

  2. My wife wanted (me) to pay for lights like this. The flyer said “starting at $2000”. I said no way.

    I did pay for a 13ft Jack Skellington for the front yard for Halloween this year, but that was ‘only’ $400 and looked better than the Christmas lights – even sang to the pedestrians strolling by.

    • Sam: I think the $2000 jobs are ones that can be done reasonably quickly with a ladder (i.e., no bucket truck).

  3. This talk about robot light stringers is akin to people who thought that horse drawn carriages needed to be modernized, and rather than inventing automobiles, they tried to invent steam powered horses to pull carriages.

    These kind of light strings are obsolete. More and more people are using a combination of multicolored, programmable laser lights, RGB-LED spotlights/floodlights, and projection lights, sometimes combined with phosphorescent paint and ultraviolet lights. I think that house could be nicely lit with half a dozen $50 LED floods, three $150 lasers, and three $100 projectors, with associated weatherproof extension cords, and perhaps darkness triggered timers if you’re lazy.

    Depending on the foliage, trees can be adequately lit either by laser lights, or by upward pointing LED floodlights. The giant Tokyo Sky Tree tower has built-in spotlights in its base for all its lighting, and you really cannot tell how the lighting is done.

  4. Still waiting for the post about Alex 1.0 I hope he continues to hit his target. Merry Christmas to all except of course Pavel and Mike, who is a dumb dumb.

    • Merry Christmas to all, especially to Toucan Sam! Without his help, my meddling in US elections would be impossible.

      Toucan Sam, did you receive the top secret iTrump 2024 campaign plans?

  5. I’ve seen the crews removing those lights from the trunks of trees after Christmas. They just cut them off and throw them away. Apparently, it’s not worth the labor cost to remove them so they can be re-used the following year.

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