How to Decorate Your Trailer Park for Christmas on a Payday Loan
Decorating a trailer park for Christmas on a payday loan means borrowing next Friday’s paycheck so a 9-foot inflatable Santa can hump the wind outside a single-wide by tonight.
Festive? Absolutely. Financially, it’s setting your wallet on fire and roasting chestnuts over it.
The winning formula is cheap LED lights, free yard junk in Santa hats, zero ladders, and a loan paid off before the lender learns your mama’s maiden name.
Everything else is tinsel and poor choices.
Trailer park Christmas decorating on a payday loan starts with the math
Nobody strolls into a payday loan store humming carols. They shuffle in like a man headed to his vasectomy, fully aware something precious is about to get clipped.
Lenders commonly charge $15 for every $100 borrowed, an APR of almost 400 percent, so $300 of tinsel costs $345 to pay back.
Tinsel. The stuff the cat throws up in March.
Go bigger and borrow the $890 the average American planned to spend on holiday gifts, food and decorations. At $15 per hundred, that fee hits $133.50 every two weeks.
And borrowers don’t pay it back in two weeks.
The CFPB found payday borrowers stay in debt a median of 199 days a year. Carry that $890 for 199 days and the fees creep toward $1,900.
That’s a 2004 Buick LeSabre with only one ghost in the back seat, spent on a light-up moose.
It gets dirtier. Nearly 22 million people live in manufactured housing, and owners pay a median of $505 a month for lot rent, utilities, insurance and taxes. That loan fee eats more than half.
Santa is now the priciest tenant on the lot, and he won’t even take his boots off in bed.
Christmas is not an emergency
Lenders swear these loans are for emergencies. Pew found 7 in 10 borrowers use them for regular bills like rent and utilities, not surprises.
Christmas doesn’t qualify, no matter how loud Aunt Brenda gets about the ham.
It lands on the same date every year like a cold sore with a worse soundtrack. Plan for it the same way, quietly, with ointment money already set aside.
The hangover is real, too. 37% of Americans racked up holiday debt averaging $1,223, and 41% of them were still paying off the year before.
Somewhere a man is making monthly payments on a light-up reindeer his dog ate two Christmases ago.
LED lights or bust
Buy LEDs.
LED strands use 70 percent less energy than old bulbs. Lighting a 6-foot tree 12 hours a day for 40 days costs $0.27 with LEDs versus $10 with incandescents.
Stack that against the loan and it gets pornographic. The fee on one borrowed hundred powers that LED tree for 55 Christmases, outlasting most marriages in the park and all three of Darrell’s.
Old C9 bulbs run hot enough to make a Fraser fir confess its sins.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission says to never string together more than three sets of incandescent lights.
Daisy-chaining eleven strands to one outlet behind the recliner is how the volunteer fire department meets your new girlfriend.
Where the LEDs go on a single-wide:
- The skirting, so the whole trailer looks like it’s hovering, which is the closest anyone on the lot will get to a spaceship.
- Porch rail.
- The aluminum awning, which ends up looking like a Vegas buffet that took a wrong turn outside Tulsa.
- The propane tank’s cage, but never the tank itself, Kevin, we’ve talked about this.
Colored lights say “Christmas.” White lights say “we own a Pinterest account and a second mortgage we don’t discuss.”
Free decorations already sitting in the yard
The cheapest decoration is whatever’s been rusting beside the steps since the Clinton administration. Slap a bow on it and call it a heritage piece.
- Pink flamingos in tiny Santa hats become reindeer, and nobody will argue, because Rudolph never had a clear anatomy lesson either.
- The bug zapper: a blue light show with live sound effects.
- A truck on cinder blocks is a sleigh that has emotionally given up. Drape it in garland and let it rest.
- That tire planter, painted red and green, is now a wreath the size of a hot tub.
- Empty Busch Light cans stacked in a pyramid and wrapped in lights. Part Christmas tree, part cry for help, fully recyclable.
The nativity scene is where the park’s creativity peaks. Joseph is a garden gnome, Mary is a flea-market lamp, and the donkey is a flamingo doing its best.
Baby Jesus is a Cabbage Patch Kid in a laundry basket, and he has seen things.
Inflatables and the saddest word in English
Deflation.
A 9-foot blow-up Santa delivers more joy per dollar than anything at Walmart. Then the motor quits at 2 a.m., and Santa folds over the fence like a groomsman after the open bar.
Inflatables go limp in the cold. Every man over 50 on the lot will relate, and at least one will get defensive about it at the potluck.
Put the fan on a timer that shuts off at 11 p.m.
Nothing kills the romance next door faster than a Grinch slowly rising outside the bedroom window mid-business, making sustained eye contact.
Stake every blow-up down hard. A loose inflatable reindeer in a stiff wind will cross three lots and land on the one trailer where somebody’s ex-husband is already having a bad night.
Real tree or fake tree in a single-wide?
Fake. Obviously fake.
83% of households displaying a tree plan on an artificial one. The other 17% have never vacuumed pine needles out of shag carpet in July.
A fake tree doesn’t die, doesn’t shed, and never asks where the relationship is going. Plenty of folks in the park have been married to worse.
Real trees also burn. About 260 home fires start with Christmas trees each year, and candles start 45% of home decoration fires.
A dried-out Douglas fir goes up like a Roman candle at a divorce party.
Standard advice says to show off the tree in the front window. In a single-wide, the front window is also about a yard from the space heater, so pick a different corner.
The neighbors will still see it, along with Uncle Ray in his boxers.
That “Christmas Cookie” candle smells a lot like “Fully Engulfed Double-Wide” around 3 a.m. Blow it out before bed.
Stay off the roof, Darrell
The CPSC counts about 160 Christmas decorating injuries a day, and nearly half involve falls. That’s what happens when a man with a 12-pack decides gutters are his personality.
The peak injury day is the Sunday after Thanksgiving, with about 660 ER visits, and roughly 5,300 of each year’s injured are 40 to 60 years old.
So the most dangerous decorator in America is a middle-aged man full of leftover turkey and something to prove.
Skip the roofline, whatever the guy with the 40-foot display two lots down says. Hang everything at waist height, where the only things that can fall are your dignity and your pants.
An ER bill on a triple-digit APR means paying interest on your own tailbone.
Sit in the lawn chair, crack a cold one, and supervise like a foreman on a job site where the job is tinsel.
The January envelope
Only 30% of Americans would cover a $1,000 surprise expense from savings, which explains why the payday store has nicer decorations than the bank and friendlier parking.
On January 2, tape an envelope marked “Baby Jesus Fund” inside the water heater closet. Feed it a twenty on the first of every month.
By December it holds two hundred and twenty bucks, charges zero APR, and never once calls the house asking for Gary.
