Take your Christmas lights down. Sweet crackers, madam! Do you realize it is still a week before Thanksgiving? The holiday season goes on for long enough as it is without the likes of you prolonging it even further. Are you so desperate for the approval of your neighbors that you must engage in this shallow display of merriment before anyone else? Are you worried you won't be the first, because somehow your self-esteem is tied into your placement in the holiday lights one-upsmanship contest?

I can see you now, hunkering in your living room, waiting for the tell-tale multicolored lights to illuminate elsewhere on your block. "Are they lit yet?" you ask, hungrily scanning the darkened street, half-hopeful, half-fearful that you will see lights. At last you can bear it no longer, and so you succumb to your compulsion, your madness. Still wearing your terrycloth nightgown, you haul the ladder outside and begin busily stringing up your lights. "I shall be the first," you mutter to yourself, giggling in a way that reminds one of Renfield in the early Dracula movies. But I must ask you—and I beg you to give it serious consideration—does it really matter who is the first to display his good cheer in the form of tiny lights on a string draped over the house like so much phosphorescent kudzu? I think not.

Perhaps I have neglected to mention that I'm a cop. I'm now ordering you to take them down because you're in violation of several local ordinances, as well as a large portion of the city charter. Pursuant to section 14, paragraph 8, the charter reads, "no citizen shall deck his halls with boughs of holly until such time as the day after Thanksgiving has occurred, upon penalty of castration and/or permanent expulsion from the community."

Okay, you have found me out. I'm not really a cop. But I do speak with authority. For I have seen the heinous nature of holiday celebrations gone awry. I have seen houses festooned with red-bowed garlands as early as July or August, and by the time the actual holiday occurs, the citizens have descended into such depths of moral lassitude and debauchery that the devil himself would look on them with greedy envy. An extended holiday is a dangerous thing indeed. I would save you from such a fate, as I would save my fair city. So please, madam. Take the infernal Christmas lights down before I have to come over there and set your house ablaze. I can do such a thing with impunity. I'm a clever, clever girl, and I know a great deal about the preparation of Molotov cocktails.