By: Mike Seuffert

There’s a house just down the street from where I live that, during the month of December each year, I’m fairly confident can be seen from outer space. Every inch of the house’s front yard, which is no more than 100 feet wide, is covered with every imaginable holiday light-up decoration that can probably be found 75 percent off at the day-after-Christmas sales.

There’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. There’s snowmen standing around the nativity scene, Baby Jesus is in Santa’s sleigh, reindeer—some of whom are missing body parts from years of decay—are scattered about, as if the house was one giant salt lick. It makes Clark Griswold’s house in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” look relatively mundane.

My wife and I affectionately refer to it all as “The House That Santa Threw Up On.”

Someone needs to help these people. That someone should be you.

Seriously, we’ve heard about many landscape companies are offering holiday decorating as an add-on service. From what I’ve seen so far this season, for the sake of good taste, even more companies need to be doing this.

No one really likes to put up Christmas lights. It’s a long, painstaking process that tests your patience, fries your nerves and makes you snap at your family members for days. And just when you think you are finally done, one little light burns out and the whole house goes dark. You’re back up on the roof again in the middle of a snowstorm checking to see which bulb blew and trying not to snap your neck by slipping on a patch of ice and falling to your death. And when that’s finally fixed, they start freaking blinking!

It’s just one of those things that you do because you’re guilted into it, like going to the ballet with your wife or exercising.

But as a business owner, you should see this as an opportunity. What would people pay for a little peace of mind during this hectic holiday season? A person’s time is worth exorbitantly more during the holiday season, between the shopping that needs to be done, the presents that need to be wrapped, the holiday cards that need to be written, the cookies that need to be baked, etc.

If I were in the business, here’s how I would sell my services to the customer (and here I’m picturing Vince Vaughn talk in my head):

“OK, here’s what we do. Before we get to your house, you send the kids away to grandma and grandpa’s house for the day. We arrive and start to work. You can go out shopping or finish up Christmas cards, go out to a nice dinner and relax. Maybe you even have a little time to smooch your wife (or husband depending on who you’re talking to.) You go pick up the kids, and when you get home, we’re gone and the house looks beautiful. The kids are happy, you are happy, and heck, even the grandparents are happy. No one even needs to know that you didn’t just do it all yourself. We promise not to tell. The alternative is spending the whole day trying to untangle cords, running back and forth to the store for extra extension cords and mom and dad yelling back and forth. Sure, we charge for our services, but instead of that small fee, just think of how much you’d end up paying for a child therapist.”

And the best part is that it’s not hard to figure out which houses need your help the most. Just drive around at night, pick your targets, and discreetly drop your flyer off either that night or the next day. It’s probably too late to convince some people this year, after they’ve already put in a hard day’s work at it, but they’ll certainly remember you next year when they pull out a strand of half blinking lights tangled together in a giant ball.

And finally, as my gift to you this holiday season, I offer you “Mike’s Rules for Holiday Decorating:”

1. No more than two “inflatables” per yard.
2. If you are going with white lights, stick to white lights. If you are going with color lights, stick to color. Mixing and matching usually doesn’t work.
3. If you are not going to string lights around the entire tree, don’t bother. It looks stupid when you wrap lights around the trunk and then stop.
4. All outdoor decorations should be taken down by February. They shouldn’t even be out that long, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt in case of terrible snowstorms.
5. If you have one of those houses where the lights flash in tune to songs by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra which I saw last year in beer commercials, I think those are cool.
6. I’m a big fan of moose, but too often I see people confuse moose with reindeer. The easiest way to tell the difference, at least among Christmas decorations: moose have two lights where their nostrils are, while reindeer have a bulb for a nose.