End-of-Tackiness Alert

Posted November 26, 2005, 8:26 p.m.

I know I’m a day late on this (as I was last year), but it is time for the annual end-of-tackiness announcement. That’s right, as of 12:00 a.m. on Friday, November 25, 2005, it is no longer tacky to display Christmas decorations, play Christmas music, or do Christmas shopping.

If you did these things on Thanksgiving or before, you have done something very tacky (this goes for both individuals and businesses [including radio stations]). You should be more cautious next year.

If you did the tacky thing and started early, you should remove your Christmas decorations the same number of days before they become tacky again (January 1, 2006). So, if you put up your Christmas decorations two days early (Wednesday) you should take them down on December 30 or earlier to compensate.

Although many businesses and radio stations put their decorations up or music on while it was still tacky, they did much better this year than in the last. Perhaps we are finally seeing a backlash against the ‘Christmas all year’ trend.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

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Norman Thomas

Nothing subsisting is greater than the rational soul, except God.

Thomas Aquinas

Let falsehood enter the world, let it even reign in the world—but not with my help.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It did . . . cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

G.K. Chesterton

It’s the most unhappy people who most fear change.

Mignon McLaughlin

I prefer the wrath of the world to the wrath of God; they can do no more than take my life.

Martin Luther

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Fulton Sheen

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.

Unknown

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Melancton Smith

Such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things.

John Locke

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Scott Bradford

The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.

Anaïs Nin

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Universal Dec. of Human Rights

All good things arrive unto them that wait—and don’t die in the meantime.

Mark Twain

The socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue.

Jordan Peterson

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

Elbert Hubbard

Faith lifts the staggering soul on one side, hope supports it on the other.

Elizabeth Ann Seton

I often wonder [if] politicians of the future, who are responsible for maintaining the prestige and effectiveness of their party, will not endeavor to train politicians who are at the same time propagandists.

Edward Bernays

How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The capital resources of the nation are not increased by using the tax collector rather than the stock market to mobilize them.

Milton Friedman