The politics of Christmas fairy lights has long lain neglected, but no more. Mick Hume flicked the switch on these pages on Tuesday and now it falls to me to fritter a little more mental energy on the subject.

Driving into my home town of Hull last weekend through the affluent villages and suburbs to its west, I was met by a blaze of light: snowmen, sleighs, Santas, each villa, semi and bungalow putting on a silvery show to rival Las Vegas. This is safe Tory territory, David Davis's seat no less, and a seasonal reminder that along with low tax and low immigration, traditional Conservatives love high camp. Probably for the best, then, that David Cameron has given up trying to wean his core voters off their addiction to ruinous electricity bills. On one of those night-sky satellite shots used to illustrate light pollution, the Tory slice of Hull would show up as a gigantic twinkly reindeer.

A mere three or four miles farther into town, you come to the Avenues, a Victorian enclave near the university, the Hampstead of Hull, home to the city's middle-class lefty community, such as it is. Here, in the safe Labour seat of Hull North, lies another feast for the student of flashing festive festoonery, the point being that there isn't any. Complete blackout. It's as if all the lecturers and teachers were worried the Luftwaffe is still overhead poised to unload. The Professor Emeritus of Economic History who lives opposite my parents has a wreath on his door the size of a saucer. My mum and dad, I notice, have gone for the single red star in the porch, Kremlin-style. Further up the road, someone (probably a Liberal) has gone for the single word display: HUMBUG. A compromise of sorts, yet not doing much to undermine the idea that of all the reasons the Left will never be truly popular in this country, the fact that it mistrusts anything popular is the strongest.

The sociology of the electrified Yuletide illumination is yet more complex in London, where the dictates of fashion and subtext are bigger considerations, to put it mildly, than they are up north. In Hackney, we hung some lights on our house last week, white icicle-effect with three modes, on, off and the exciting intermittent.

“Very Romford,” commented our neighbour, meaning it as an archly ironic nod to what he took to be a postmodern statement. Little did he know we were actually working the treble bluff, and making a post-postmodernism declaration, in which you put up fairy lights because you like fairy lights.

Next year I might take things on another stage and go for the huge red and green Father Christmas climbing a ladder. With an inflatable sack of goodies tethered to the gutter. Or then again, I might not put up any fairy lights at all. What would that be? Post-post-postmodernism, I suppose, which is another way of saying you're coming perilously close to disappearing up your own chimney.

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