DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Over the holidays we drove through the neighborhood of the Anheuser-Busch brewery headquarters in St. Louis. A-B, as natives call it, puts on an impressive display of light — some 750,000 tiny white bulbs strung through the trees along the block. It’s beautiful.

I learned that the stringing begins in October; the crew works three months to hang the lights.

I was thinking, if it takes three months to hang the lights, it probably takes three more to pull them down — which means they’ve got guys out there 50% of the time, dealing with Christmas lights. It seems extravagant, by which I mean “crazy.”

In fact A-B is not that crazy. They don’t pay their union electricians to spend three months carefully taking the lights down after the holidays. Rather, they pay the electricians to spend about a week: a few days cutting the strands into little pieces, and a few more sweeping up the mess. And next October the brewery will buy another 750,000 Christmas lights.

This astounds me, that a company with such a good reputation in the community can be so wasteful and disrespective of the environment. While it’s true that the light display earns great reviews, I suspect if the folks around town knew all those lights would end up in the landfill on January 1, they’d feel a bit less inclined toward romance and a bit more irked at the misprioritization of flash over common sense. I am, anyway.

Admiring A-B’s Christmas lights is like admiring a smokestack. “Oh, look, that cloud of toxins is so pretty, how about a little smooch?” Gad.