Is Western the trashy neighbor who leaves their Christmas lights up all year?

The holidays are a special time of year, anticipated and enjoyed by nearly everyone.

I know I always look forward to driving around and looking at beautifully decorated houses around town and Krug Park.

It was so much fun coming to “Light the Night” when Western illuminated the clock tower and the trees surrounding it, on that rainy night back in November. But the key word in that last sentence was “NOVEMBER.”

The clock tower lights were turned on four days after Thanksgiving. I, and many people on campus, think it may be time to take them down.

It has officially been 11 weeks. The opinion on the lights has gone from being “Well, it’s a little past due” to “OK, that is seriously trashy. Take the damn things down already.”

So, is Western going to be the kind of campus that starts out looking really good, clean, and well maintained, and then creeps slowly into trashiness as the years go by?

Maybe a maintenance truck will break down, so the crew leaves it on the sidewalk, and slowly, as other maintenance trucks have flats, they take off the wheels, one by one, replacing it with a cinder block. Soon, the body of a dead old truck is propped on cinder blocks, rotting in the middle of campus.

Or maybe when the furniture in Murphy gets replaced, the old couches just get sat outside for the smokers to sit on. That would be a very nice gesture.

And why don’t we stop mowing the lawns and replacing all the asphalt with gravel? As long as we’re going in that direction, why don’t we book Larry the Cable Guy as next year’s convocation speaker? That would be fabulously trashy.

Let’s get it together, Western.

It’s not a bad school. And most of the time, it looks very well kempt. But the holidays were ages ago.

Most of us have already forgotten what we received.

Let’s get those lights down already.