Dialogue: Hard to stop at one set of fairy lights

Outdoor Christmas lighting is, more than ever, part of the festive season. But the practice has its inherent dangers, writes PAMELA WADE*.

When the Santa parade is over, you know we are in free-fall towards Christmas. The junk mail multiplies exponentially, there's a flurry of end-of-year school events, your social life suddenly does a Lazarus and the good folk of Franklin Rd in Ponsonby make their annual assault on the levels of the southern lakes.

Not that they are alone: they simply have the highest profile of all the houses and streets throughout the country where outdoor Christmas lighting has become so spectacular that you would be forgiven for thinking you had strayed on to a set from Home Alone.

Harmless enough, you might think. What is wrong with a few fairy lights flung over a tree? Shows a neighbourly festive spirit, adds to the jollity of the season, helps prevent ACC claims by stumbling burglars busy doing a reverse Santa.

Be warned: Christmas lights are the heroin of the home handyman brigade. It is no more possible to stop at one string of coloured lights than it is to try a bit of a bungy-jump. Before you know it, your entire house and garden will be festooned with every permutation of illumination.

The roof will be outlined like some starry join-the-dots puzzle, there will be twinkling coloured lights draped along the fence, a squiggle of chase lights on the porch trellis to mesmerise anyone approaching the door, and a cluster of flashing lanterns suspended above the pond, inducing epileptic fits in the goldfish.

Drive through any neighbourhood from now until mid-January and you will be dazzled by the electrical profligacy. Even the tiresome fact that late sunsets diminish the effect of the lights does not put anyone off; on the contrary, a whole new tradition has sprung up.

On Christmas Eve, cars filled with excited children in pyjamas join long queues crawling through the suburbs, where there are not just odd houses lit up. There are entire streets, with neighbours competing to put on the most spectacular display.

Increasingly, stores are supplying this new must-have urge, but those householders keen to keep ahead of the masses turn instead to the internet for sources of bigger and better tableaus.

All tastes are catered for on the web. You could have something modest and tasteful, like a star - but that is to misunderstand the nature and purpose of Christmas lights. That would be like calling two sparklers and a roman candle a fireworks display.

No, what you want is the jet-skiing Santa towing Rudolph on water skis, or the 2m-high animated angel carousel.

Got a large lawn? The Santa sleigh with all seven reindeer is the one for you: almost 2m high, 13m long and picked out with 3000 lights.

If you are restricted to a smaller scale, how about my personal favourite - the carolling dog with bow and wagging tail, only a metre high and a snip at $US49.99?

Unfortunately, these illuminated glories present us with difficulties unsuspected by their Northern Hemisphere manufacturers. To fix them in place, we must use drawing pins that fall out and endanger bare feet, or tape that either droops off in the sun, leaving sticky marks, or clings so tenaciously that, come Twelfth Night, it fetches off the paint.

And they must be plugged in, of course, so we have to plot a complicated arrangement of extension cords and power boards, devise a method of keeping them dry in the heaviest summer downpour, and deal with the cables.

This is where Christmas and summer make particularly awkward partners. If your partnership fits the pattern of one electrical enthusiast and one keen gardener, this can lead to a modern War of the Roses.

The gardener, who has planned all year for the great early-summer flush of flowers, planting, spraying, pruning and nurturing, is unimpressed, when strolling out to do a little light dead-heading, to find a garish orange cable strung across Mme Alfred Carriere and an old paint bucket stuffed with transformers plonked in the middle of the penstemons. Sharp words can ensue.

Nor is the irritation one way. If an over-enthusiastic bout of weeding tweaks the lights precariously arranged around the pond, and they fall in, the recriminations can go on for weeks. Outdoor lights are impervious only to rain, it transpires, not total immersion.

The only answer is yin and yang. You have to achieve a balance between the place looking good in both the light and the dark.

It's not easy, so it is just as well that this particular difficulty arises only during the season of peace and goodwill to all men - even those who trip backwards over their own cables and take out an entire clump of Peruvian lilies.

* Pamela Wade is an Auckland writer.