Neighbors, start your Christmas lights

Each year the weekend after Thanksgiving, I sense an innate urge to risk life, limb and public humiliation by festooning the exterior of our home with several hundred C9 incandescent lights. (I'm still resisting the whole LED craze – also known as "the Devil's bulbs.")

My mild-mannered next-door neighbor and I always engage in an unspoken competition to see who can get their Christmas lights up fi...