Christmas

The lights go up the day the system is installed — and never come down.

Classic red and green. Icy whites that read like frost. Candy-cane chases running up the gables. Switch the whole house over the morning the tree goes up, and back to warm white in January without touching a ladder, without untangling anything, and without that one strand that worked fine in the box.

Alberta makes a good argument for this. Nobody enjoys hanging lights in November, and the weekend you finally get to it is usually the weekend it turns minus twenty. The system is already up there. December is a tap on your phone.

It also means you are lit for the whole season rather than the three weeks you could face the job. And when the neighbours are out in the cold in early January taking theirs down, you are changing a setting.