A cheap, tacky Christmas

I have been looking everywhere for plug-in electric candles for our windows and have had no luck. We have a few but I need more for the additional windows. I’ve tried Target, the Christmas Tree store, the dollar store, Lowe’s, supermarkets, etc. Nowhere. I don’t want the kind that run on batteries or have LEDs. I just want cheap, old-fashioned, plastic plug-in candles.

I favor a cheap Christmas — not in terms of cheaping out on gifts for people but in terms of decorations. Since we have more land this year, we are able to decorate outside more so we went out and bought LED net lights for our bushes. They weren’t cheap. We’d like to put up more lights but don’t need to do everything in one year, considering we still have a room that is largely unfurnished and I’d rather save my money for something we’ll have all year than just one month a year.

Sometimes you don’t want LED lights that will last forever. You just want cheap strings of lights that may or may not burn out but it doesn’t matter because they were $5. If you’re using something year round, it does make sense to invest upfront in something that will last and save money in the long run. However, if it’s something you’re only going to pull out of storage once a year, it makes more sense to me that it be cheap.

I don’t need to pay $8 each, not including batteries, for fancy window candles. I’d rather spend less and if the bulb burns out, it’s like 50 cents to replace at any store. LED lights are nice but the glow is cold and sometimes I miss the warmer, cheaper strings of lights from childhood. We had specific strings of lights, long gone, that I still remember and miss. They don’t make them like that anymore.

Christmas décor also should be tacky. That’s where the Christmas Tree store can come in handy. I’ve bought stuff from there that broke immediately (that’s why it’s cheap). But if it’s stuff that doesn’t have an on/off switch, like a knickknack, it’s a good store. There’s a lot of garish stuff there and that’s Christmas to me: An explosion of red and green and blinking lights. Idolize the Victorian Christmas all you want but it’s false nostalgia because those people were basically walking around in an open sewer.