BY CHANDLER GARLAND – STAFF WRITER
With the passing of Halloween comes the beginning of the holiday season, and that means it’s time to tear down the spider webs and put up the tinsel.
You can go all out like Beta Theta Pi and put a full-sized Christmas tree in your suite, house or Brockman, with a wreath on the door and string-lights around the columns. Decent sized trees can be found at Wal-Mart or Garden Ridge for low prices, and string lights are even easier to obtain.
“I know last year there were cheap lights at Lowes. At Wal-Mart, the cheap ones are in the wedding section, actually, and one box is about $5,” junior Natalie Trammell said.
Lights are easily hung from the ceiling and walls using Command hooks. The ones that work best are small photo hooks that allow you to snap the cord in so the lights stay in place.
“I also would slip bits of the cable under some of the ceiling tile corners to hold them into place,” Trammell said.
If you are hanging them from the ceiling you can also unbend a paperclip to create a hook and slip one end under the ceiling tile and hook the string light cable on the other end.
String lights also provide your living space with an alternative light source to harsh fluorescents. They still allow you to light up the whole room brightly enough to read without straining your eyes, and change the entire atmosphere of your dorm into a festive and cozy nook. String lights also are made to be fire hazard-safe, meaning the little bulbs don’t get hot enough to produce energy to create a spark.
Besides lights, there are other things that can be hung up or brought in that will transform your space for the holidays.
“Flat things that can hang on a wall, like canvases or stockings, and window decals are a really fun way to decorate,” junior Paige Anderson said.
These kinds of decorations are better for more modest spaces like double and single dorms. Tinsel is cheap and easy to hang. You can use the same kind of Command hook chain that you would use to hang string lights, or you can even hang the tinsel with the lights to make your string lights more festive.
Command hooks can also be used to hang stockings and posters as well.
“My roommate has a little plastic Christmas tree and then we are getting tinsel and ornaments to decorate it. We’ll probably hang tinsel around the closets, too” sophomore Tyler Dawson-Arroyo said. “To minimize the space taken up, we’ll be keeping it on the walls, so it’s like trimming. The Christmas tree might go on my microwave so it won’t take up too much space.”
Little trees, tinsel, and Christmas stockings can all be found at Wal-Mart, Dollar General, Goodwill, and various other locations around town. If you ask your mom nicely she may let you borrow some decorations from home.
“My roommate is Jewish so we have some decorations for Hanukkah too,” Trammell said.
These include things like window decals, canvases and perhaps a little menorah. Candles of course are prohibited for fire safety reasons, but battery-powered electric candles can be found at Wal-Mart for a decent price. Electric candles, much like string lights also provide a decent amount of festive lighting.
So go wild this holiday season when you decorate your dorm room and show campus some cheer as we enter finals week, one of the most stressful times of the