Tis the season.

Welp, it's official. I survived my first semester of college -- hopefully with a 3.0. And now I'm home (and by home, I mean bored) for the holidays.

Not surprisingly, I have something to rant about:

Christmas lights.

At this time every year, each yard and house is decorated in full glory with Christmas lights. They range is color and style, each house being unique in amount and arrangement. Recently, I discovered my pet peeve for such lights.

It all started when I was pulling out of my OWN driveway for work. Our lights had popped on (they're on a handy little self-timer), and I couldn't help but notice the net lights draped on our dead rosebushes. Given, we have a lot of other lights up (not excluding the giant Santa and Snowman blow-ups in the middle of the yard), but my eyes immediately went to the dead rosebushes. I would think the point of Christmas lights would be to highlight the POSITIVES of your yard. Like wrapping a string of lights around the light post, for example. It would also make it more visible to drunk holiday drivers on an icy street, "OH SHIT I'M ABOUT TO HIT GIANT A CANDY CANE." 2 birds with one stone. What would be the point of draping net lights over dead rosebushes anyway? What are they supposed to look like? Random heaps of light? I don't understand. So that got me thinking -- what is the point of Christmas lights? And decided they are for highlighting your house, or trees in your yard or something. And then, before even leaving my neighborhood, I spotted another holiday light faux-pas. The house on the corner had lights carelessly draped on their baby trees. Now, there's nothing wrong with draping lights on baby trees. In fact, I encourage it. I'd rather see lights on baby trees than dead rosebushes. But it looks like they let their 6-year-old do it. And gave him a 3 second deadline. I don't understand. If you're going to take the time (and power, for that matter) to put up Christmas lights, at least make them look good. If you don't have the time, why do it at all? You're just going to have to take them down in a month (give or take) anyway.

And then there's the whole deal about the actual lights themselves. Icicle lights? Oh wait those are supposed to look like icicles? Because all I see are zig-zagged white things that look tacky.

I get it -- some people don't have parts of their house to highlight. So people like my parents are forced to drape lights on dead rosebushes (but really, we have no excuse. Plenty of columns to wrap lights on and look pretty).

But now that I've noticed this, it's just one more thing that will bug me about humanity.

Too much time on your hands.