What Christmas Lights in January Say about Those Who Insists on Following Social Norms

The three-story house lit up like the entrance of a high-end mall. Yellow string lights run the vertical length from the rooftop balcony to the garden below. A velvet red bow tie runs the horizontal length across the second floor, while a balloon snowman and a Christmas tree bookend the whole spectacle on the top and bottom. The fact that the house is surrounded by the characteristic beige stone houses of Malta, with not a decorative light in sight, only serves to accentuate its visually prominent place in the quiet residential neighborhood on an average night.

All this would not be so surprising if it were the weeks leading up to Christmas, but it is now a good week and a half into 2026.  There's a good reason that the neighborhood is all dark save for that one three-story house. As festive as Christmas can be, people also respect their neighbors, avoiding light pollution and noise of all types beyond what is considered socially normative. By that standard, those festive lights are now treated not with "wow" but a frown, as passersby wonder just how tone-deaf some people can be even though, but how old the house is, they have lived there for decades. 

But perhaps that's just my interpretation. After all, Malta can be an exceedingly relaxed place, where old men while away hours over slow conversations, sitting by seaside benches. The same type of people may inhabit the house, taking their sweet time to take down what surely was a painstaking effort. Indeed, coming from East Asian cultures where being in a hurry is considered a virtue and many people have no idea how to slow down even for leisure, I've come to see any behavior that could be sped up to not be so as abnormal.

A good example is how this blog is written. I used to open up and spontaneously jot down my thoughts, especially when traveling to new places. Those streams of consciousness are meant to be raw and immediate, meaningful because they happened almost in real-time, and the memories remain fresh. But now, with so many tasks lined up, writing up blog posts has become a scheduled task in itself, in which the virtue is finishing early when time allows for it, so that it doesn't clog up time for other chores that will surely come. 

The unwritten rule of one post per week minimum has become a kind of obligation that needs to be fulfilled alongside other deadlines, especially in the December rush. As the students are messaging left and right to make sure essays get checked hours before official college application deadlines, a blog post becomes just another essay in the pipeline, to be written, edited, and declared "good (enough) to go." If admissions officers can see through last-ditch efforts to sound intellectual, surely any discerning reader on this blog can, too.

However, as some people I've met over the years so fondly say, the prospect of getting things done in order, close to their respective deadlines, is almost an adrenaline rush, which, paradoxically in my eyes, increases the quality of their work and satisfaction with their tasks. Of course, there can be little empirical evidence for such a phenomenon, but the very existence of justification for people running the risks of last-minute hiccups just to taste the nervousness of near-failure may not be so different from those who enjoy near-death experiences on everything from bungee jumping to skydiving.

All this would be ludicrous to the man whose house still offers Christmas vibes in January. Perhaps he has his own schedule for when the lights will finally come off, but one thing is certain: he decides it himself without any societal or regulatory pressure. Who knows? Maybe he instead gets an adrenaline rush from seeing others become anxious on his behalf, struggling to figure out why he is breaking social norms so blatantly. Better yet, he simply has no schedule, putting up and taking down based on the intuition of "when I feel like it."

Either way, for this author, I'm equally, if not more, envious of the houseowner's mentality, as the lights themselves. The socially ingrained behavior of constantly chasing "the need to finish" is only exacerbated by seeing everyone else around me doing exactly the same. Anyone who refuses is branded unprofessional, uncooperative, and thoroughly unsuited for a community supposedly striving to make the world a better place, whether it be a company or a university.  I would be a glorious day when we can all just kick back and enjoy some bright lights instead.