I live in a nice house, with expensive furniture and proper lighting, great sunlight and large windows, and it just feels like any otherhouse. It’s not really “cozy”.
(Tl;dr for the next paragraph: It’s just me describing my shithole of a basement to hopefully foster a proper image in your mind. If you don’t want to bother, well... as I said, it’s a shithole.)
On the other hand, we’ve got a rather large basement my brother and I have turned into a “chill space”. The walls are cement and stone, covered with cheap white paint, and the floor is similar, just smoother and grey. The ceiling is old and crossed with worn green support beams, nails jutting out and cobwebs all over. In between them is pink fiberglass insulation and copper pipes, with a few water pipes rapped in foil and fluorescent light tubes only turned on for cleaning. There are exposed systems all over, with the fuse box and communication cables haphazardly placed on the wall, and a creaky boiler and water heater smack dab in the middle of the room. The furniture isn’t nice, and only moderately comfortable, with the rugs, couches, and tables near exclusively acquired off of the streets or at yard sales, mostly stuff you’d find tucked away in a grandmother’s house. For decorations, the walls are covered in colored pencil and crayon, with a mix of wondeful and creative art from the imaginary and phaluses and scribbles from the rebellious. Rusty memorabilia and faded alcohol bottles line the walls and shelves, along with cheap yard sale art and a few spray-painted pieces of plywood. A couple metal shelves still line the walls, packed with odds and ends from when the basement was only used for storage, covered with floral sheets to be kept out of sight. An old TV connected to a few years-old gaming consoles is set up next to the boiler, along with a wall of speakers from the 70s, half of which don’t work. They sound good and are plenty loud, but as for how they look, they are all huge, boxy, and made with cheap materials, with the covers all off andthe circular rubber woofers exposed. The whole wall is covered with a thin layer of dust and confetti from a party years ago that nobody dares clean, as too not disturb the macgyvered wires and cords which run along the back.
Now, hopefully you can imagine what this all looks like, but here is the thing that has always mystified me. The few windows are tiny and faded, so lights are required to see, however if I when I turn on the fluorescent lights, my basement looks like a crack-den, and from what I can imagine regular household lights wouldn’t look much different. To remedy this, my brother and threw up perhaps a dozen strands of corded christmas lights, with no real preference to appearance. The majority are standard LED strands, some multi colored and others solid, some pulsing and others static. Along with those we’ve got a couple stands of retro LED lights designed to look like the bulbs of old, as well as two novelty strands, one with large and white twinkling snowflakes and the other with vibrant red jalapeño peppers. All I can say is that the vibe these lights throw out is so soothing and cozy that it can entice me, and others, for hours, whether it be watching tv, reading in the dim light, listening to music, or scrolling on the phone. Of all those who visit the den, whether it be broke teens, busy millennials, or well structured and adjusted adults who’ve long since passed their rebellious phase, they all agree the basement’s vibe is unique and wonderful, and attribute it to the christmas lights.
I’m sure many of you can attest to the coziness of christmas lights wherever they are set up, and I’ve seen this opinion many times on the internet, but I’ve always wondered why? What makes these goofy little lights so appealing?
Submitted October 16, 2019 at 08:28AM by Cherry-Bandit https://ift.tt/35DRoGp
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