Last year, as a surprise for our daughter who was returning home from her first semester at college, my husband and I decided to go all out on outdoor holiday lights. My husband used to string white lights atop the bushes in the front yard, and trim the top edge of our pool house with a mix of colorful hues, until he no longer had the time for it and the lights would glow well into the new year—much longer than I liked. Since this was our first time paying for a light installation, I wasn’t sure who to call, much less when we had only a week to go before our daughter arrived into town. Fortunately, I work from home at a desk in a corner of a second-floor room with a good view of my neighborhood. For a few weeks, I had noticed a truck down the street bearing a logo for HydroDynamics. I decided to call the number.
Fast forward a few weeks.
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The holidays are past us. The Christmas tree is down. The ornaments are stored. The outdoor lights, however, are still up and I’m in the woods about when I should have them taken down. It seems that they should have been disassembled around the same time as the tree, etc., but most of the houses on my street are still festively lit at night. Do they know something I don’t?
As we enter the second full week of January, I decided to make some calls about the lights. Josh Ratchje, operations manager at HydroDynamics, says that most of their clients want their lights down by the second or third week of January but that the snow storm has hampered some of their work. There are a few outliers, he adds, who request that their lights remain in place until early February. Interior designer Jackie Leisler usually puts up her house lights during the week of Thanksgiving, and takes them down after the 6th of January “or, honestly, when weather cooperates,” she says. “I usually don’t keep them on after the 6th, even though lights tend to make a neighborhood so joyful.”
I’m in Leisler’s camp. Barring a snowstorm next year, I’ll plan to give myself a January 6 deadline–for both inside and outdoor holiday decor.
