The holiday season is all about traditions, right?
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Well, the great American songwriter Bob Dylan certainly thinks so.
Each year, the “Like A Rolling Stone” singer half-heartedly decorates his house during the Christmas season and this year was no different.
And yet again, the work was captured on social media by Dylan’s neighbor, author and journalist Merrill Markoe, who has for over a decade documented Dylan’s semi-festive behavior in his Malibu home around Christmastime.
This year, however, Markoe says it’s her last year doing so. She can’t take the stress anymore of looking at and thus interpreting his meager strings of lights and plaster nativity scenes. She wonders: What does it all mean?
This year, Dylan landed on a simple string of multicolored lights overlayed on top of some bushes. Markoe, as you can see below, attributed each bulb to an event in Dylan’s life in 2021.
Markoe took to Twitter to begin her final thread on the subject, writing, “Because people keep bugging me, here are you-know-who’s Xmas lights. For THE VERY LAST TIME. But I can no longer take the strain of trying to translate such an obscure method of communication. See thread for my LAST interpretation EVER.”
Markoe later responded to a Twitter comment that read, “the oddest thing about this years lights is that they’re… normal looking ?” by saying, “That’s why i stopped doing the piece. After the Woolsey fire burned down the original hedge, the grounds-keeper or security guard or other employee and/or relative who is in charge of this task apparently stopped drinking.”
Then she responded to another user who said, “Don’t be a quitter! This tradition lives because of you and you alone!” by saying, “It’s apparent to me that someone new achieved sobriety and then took over the lighting chores.”
And with that, the tradition has come to an end.
