News story: A man in Tampa, Fla., hired some pros to put up his Christmas lights on Nov. 6. His homeowners association fined him $1,000 for putting them up too early.
Perhaps the problem wasn't having the lights up. It was having the lights on. My sympathy ebbs for someone who turns on the lights on Nov. 8. It's the visual equivalent of setting off fireworks during the last week of June.
The problem is also busybody junior Stasi snitches in HOAs, who lie awake at night convinced that someone six blocks over painted their mailbox an unapproved hue. Granted, it's on the porch, you can't see it from the street and you have to walk up to the house to take a look, snap a picture and then compare the color against the list of permitted colors, but it's the principle of the thing.
There are rules. Allow a nonapproved mailbox hue, and people will think "I can choose a gray shingle that has a slight white fleck" instead of the approved Charcoal and Charcoal Dusk. I mean, really, you have two choices, it's not like you're living in some Communist hell.
Permit early light installation, and it all falls apart. Anarchy. People mowing their lawns so the grass is an inch high instead of three-quarters. Doorbells lacquered with red nail polish. Flags, oh my lord, flags. The next thing you know children talk back to their parents, dogs bite their owners, there's partner-swapping basement bacchanalias and people parking cars on the street. Overnight. Aliens arrive in a century and see a burned-out husk of a planet, skeletons in the streets with their bony hands around the bony throats of others, and wonder what happened to unleash civil disorder.
Bob's pre-Thanksgiving holiday lights illumination, that's what. People saw that, thought "Well, I guess there is no God to whom I must answer," and it all fell apart.
I put my lights up early. But I don't live in an HOA. My neighborhood is a live-and-let-live place that keeps the peace by time-honored Minnesota ways: behind-the-back whisper campaigns and undetectable ostracization. (Kidding!) (Mostly.)
I put up the lights weeks ago, because it was warm, and I had too many memories of stopping the tree-festooning process to go inside, draw a bucket of hot water and attempt to get feeling back in my hands. If that pinky snaps off and drops in the snow, you're not finding it 'til spring.