Actually I can think of a few valid reasons why people might have Christmas lights strung around their homes in October.
I used to have a booth in an indoor market. The building was actually well lighted, with both skylight windows in the roof and electric lights in the ceiling, but as people walked in out of the sunshine and caught a whiff of the black mold in the building, they tended to start babbling about caves and coal mines. When I rented my booth, a previous renter had strung fairy lights all over the entrance and never taken them down for fear of ruining them. I left them up. When it was cloudy outside and gloomy inside, the little lights might have helped people see. When the sunshine was pouring in through the skylights I could switch off the lights. If people said, "What is this about? Christmas in July?" I could always say, "Of course! Shop early to get the best bargains!"
Then there's the history of places that have "red-light districts" where activities that are technically illegal go on in people's private homes, and the home owners pay the police not to ask questions. Red lights at a window were the traditional mark that a house was open to visitors in search of a little vice. The tradition declined as laws loosened up in the early twentieth century. Still, Christmas lights come in strings of white, mixed colors, or just one color. Often the color is red.
My town is not, however, big enough to have a red-light district. What we do have a lot of are retired people. When I see fairy lights in between New Year's Day and Thanksgiving, what comes to my mind is "The person who lived there is getting too 'old' to climb up on a stepladder and is waiting for someone else to take down the lights."
"What do you think of the way people go overboard with their Christmas decorations? Lights all over the house before it even gets dark early enough for anyone to see them. How much money does that sort of thing cost people? Is it really about Christmas, spending a lot of money on that kind of display?" some people often ask, typically the first time they spend any part of the Christmas season in a Southern State. I think David C. Barnette wrote a very funny book that ridicules the excesses nicely:
I never have spent much time thinking about people's holiday decorations or lack of them, actually. I figure it's their business. Some people enjoy the light shows. In Kingsport they sometimes organize walking tours of the most fancifully lighted houses, and give prizes for the most original arrangements of fairy lights. Some houses in Gate City look as if their owners were competing for those prizes, and some look as if somebody had been given a string of lights by a relative and wanted to hang it up as a souvenir.
But this year...
This year of pain at the pump, pain at the checkout counter, and pain at every month's electric bill...
This year of war...This web site is Virtual Switzerland. Nobody at this web site even knows any Russian or Ukrainian people personally. Only because everyone is mad at Vlad 'cos bombing towns is always bad do we have any reason to feel more sympathy toward Ukraine. Reading that those countries quarrelled because Ukraine wants to retain more remnants of socialism makes some of our correspondents more sympathetic to Russia. Whatever. Anyway there are homeless and even parentless children out there, because of their stupid war, and their winter weather is beyond anything people in the Southern States can imagine. They would probably never agree that what we have is winter.
This year of floods and hurricanes and power outages...
This year when children at our own schools may be deprived of books that fit their minds, or shoes that fit their feet...
This year might be a good year to reflect, now or whenever you start decorating, on what Christmas is all about. Fairy lights don't burn a great deal of electricity but they do add to the bill. Even the little you can save by not hanging them up might mean a lot to a child.
This might be a good year to decorate with the receipts you get from legitimate charities.
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