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All right kids, lights out
By Taylor Sullivan
tsulli21@mscd.edu

Happy January, everyone, and welcome back to school. It’s time to finally put down your Wii controllers, purge your New Year’s Eve hangover and forget all about the holidays.

Not so fast, Denver City and County Building. Stay right where you are. You have to stay lit up like the holiday-clown whore you are.

Apparently, as tradition has it, whoever is in charge of the holiday lights at the City and County Building must be a full-blooded redneck, procrastinating against taking down the lights until they get Federico Peña’s ’84 Trans-Am off of the cinder blocks in Civic Center Park.

So what is behind this post-holiday, call-the-tenants’-association-to-complain, city-wide embarrassment? According to Denvergov.org, it is a tradition to keep the holiday lights lit, not through the duration of the holiday season, but until the king of cow-town antics, the National Western Stock Show, leaves town. So shortly after the New Year’s Ball drops, the building changes from a holiday-clown whore to a rodeo-clown whore.

Illustration by Adam Goldstein • goldstea@mscd.edu

Ahhh. Now it all makes sense. Red and green lights are an obvious representation of bull riding and funnel cake. And all the livestock from the nativity scene makes an easy transition into stock-show fare, with Joseph and the three wise men making excellent cowboys, and Santa standing in as a fine champion hog.

Everyone with any sense in Denver is like the nagging wife in this situation, begging their lay-about husband Duane, the “Electronic Technician,” to take down the Christmas lights. Duane’s response? “Hold up, baby, right after the hog-tie competition. And bring me another Coors Light, will ya?”

Wake up, Denver. Duane is passed out on the couch, and Jerry Springer reruns are blaring on the tube. The other state capitals on the block are all laughing at us and telling their kids not to play in our yard.

This extravagance wouldn’t be a problem if the displays at the City and County Building were tasteful. But seriously, a blind kindergarten class could do a classier job than the floodlight disaster that drowns the building every year. It looks like a prisoner is trying to escape lockup at the Fisher Price Penitentiary. And let’s be honest, they’re not holiday lights, they’re Christmas lights. Hello, baby Jesus? So why are they left up for the stock show? You’d have to ask the ghost of Buffalo Bill himself.

The only reason anyone comes to this town is because they expect an Old-West-style shootout to break out any minute, cowboys flying through the window of the corner saloon. And we wonder why! Maybe it’s the shining beacon that can be seen from space telling the whole world that Denver never left 1878, that we are frozen in time like a woolly mammoth from the ice age. We don’t even have cars here, just horses and carriages. No police, just the respect that comes at the end of a Winchester. In fact, you will probably find some gold just sitting in the street next to the South Platte. If you can’t find us, just follow the smell of cow manure and the holy lights of the West.

If Denver wanted to leave the lights on a little longer, the least they could do is come up with a better excuse, like Chinese New Year’s, or Presidents’ Day, or “I’ll do it next Saturday,” for God’s sake. Almost anything would be better than the National Western Stock Show, except maybe a clown whore. Anything is better than a clown whore.