STORY: Since the first weekend in Advent, it has been shining and flashing again: the Christmas house in Olching, a small suburb of Munich. Manfred Piringer had to take a two-year break due to the pandemic, but this year he was finally able to switch on his around 20,000 lights again. Piringer and his family have been putting a lot of love and energy into this colorful project for over 20 years. In the meantime, however, he has to take a closer look at the electricity costs: “Of course they have increased enormously. But we switched to LEDs a long time ago. And we also try, for example when it rains, not to switch on the lights. We switch the lights on only when people come. And that’s on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so when the show is on. And when we realize that nobody comes by at all, then the whole thing is turned off.” Environmental groups have been critical of Christmas lights for a long time, not just since the current energy crisis. For Hauke Doerk from the Munich Environmental Institute, the flashing holiday decorations are something like the tip of the iceberg in an escalated “hyper-consumption society.” “It is an estimate from 2021 that 19.5 billion lights will be switched on, just in private households. That then makes up the electricity consumption over a year of 200,000 households, i.e. a medium-sized city. And it is estimated that the lighting of communities and cities and so on top of that with the same order of magnitude. Well, there is already a lot of savings potential there.” According to Doerk, feeding the lighting from renewable energies would be a big step. LEDs, as used in the Olching Christmas house, are also a lot Despite the energy crisis, it was clear to Piringer that he didn’t want to do without his mega lighting. “There will always be people who don’t like houses like this. That has already happened before, it actually has nothing at all to do with the energy crisis. A Christmas house splits. It’s like looking at a beautiful picture. Some like the picture, others don’t like the picture. Some celebrate Christmas traditionally, others a little differently. But I always say, live and let live.” So that it remains at least acoustically inconspicuous, visitors can follow the half-hour show at the Christmas house via wireless headphones. That way, the neighbors aren’t blasted with music – and after all, that’s something like a piece of Christmas peace.