Two minutes with Danny Katz: Let there be lights – off

My neighbours’ twinkling fairy lights are starting to do my head in. It’s March after all. How can I politely ask them to put the Christmas cheer away until December?
L.B., Yass, NSW

A: You live in Yass, so I’m guessing the town is filled with positive, helpful Yass people. If you asked your neighbour to take down their Christmas lights, I’m sure they’d say, “Yasssss! Of course! No probs!” You wouldn’t get that kind of response in the pessimistic Victorian town of Nhill. And you wouldn’t even bring it up in the scary alpine shire of Mount Buggery.

Twinkling fairy lights are a delightful part of the Christmas season. We see them on neighbours’ houses and think, “Awwww, so festive! It brightens the street and lifts the human soul!” Then, 15 minutes past midnight on Christmas Day, we think, “Okay, enough. Getting annoying. If those lights aren’t down by tomorrow, I’m calling the council.”

Sometimes, it’s not even a Christmassy thing. I had a neighbour who draped his entire backyard in fairy lights to stop possums eating his fruit trees, with the lights set to Twinkle-Flashing, Neighbourhood-Strobing, CIA-Torture Mode. It didn’t stop the possums: they just thought it was some kind of ’80s dance club and queued on the fence, slamming down fermented fruit shots and snorting lines of white powdery mildew through curled-up spiders’ leaves. Meanwhile, I couldn’t sleep, metabolise or blink both eyes at the same time.

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So try what I eventually tried: I told my neighbour that his fairy lights were giving me sensory overload – and while telling him, I yawned, trembled and blinked my eyes out of sync. He removed the lights that day. Then he installed a possum-repelling, high-frequency, neighbourhood-resonating sound-generator.

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