Are people who put up Christmas decorations earlier happier?
There is always one house in your street that is decked with twinkling lights before anyone else has even started to think about Christmas.
For most of us, the Christmas season starts on the first of December, and we don’t bring out the boxes of decorations until then.
So what about those who put their Christmas decorations up earlier? What does this say about them?
According to Steve McKeown, psychoanalyst, founder of MindFixers and owner of the McKeown Clinics, there could be a number of reasons why some people decorate earlier, but most commonly it’s “for nostalgic reasons either to relive the magic or to compensate for past neglect.”
“In a world full of stress and anxiety people like to associate to things that make them happy and Christmas decorations evoke those strong feelings of the childhood,” he said.
“Decorations are simply an anchor or pathway to those old childhood magical emotions on excitement. So, putting up those Christmas decorations early extend the excitement!”
Moreover, according to the Journal of Environmental Psychology, decorations are used as “cues as a way of communicating their accessibility to neighbors’.
It turns out that those with decorations were considered more “friendly and cohesive”.
All the more reason to deck the halls earlier than later.
