December is objectively the best gaming month. The nights are long, there is a pile of games you bought in the autumn sale and have not touched, and for roughly two weeks the world agrees that doing nothing is acceptable.
It is also the month when your carefully calibrated setup gets invaded by fairy lights, and there are right and wrong ways to handle that.
The Glare Problem Nobody Warns You About
Here is the issue. You have spent real money getting your monitor positioned, your bias lighting dialled in and your room dark enough that dark scenes actually read as dark. Then someone drapes a string of cool white LEDs across the shelf behind you and every one of them appears as a point reflection in your screen.
The fix is positional. Keep any light source out of the arc behind and beside the monitor, which is where reflections land. Put the tree and the lights behind where you sit, not behind the screen. Light coming from behind your head illuminates the room without bouncing off the panel.
If the tree has to go in the wrong place, warm white at low brightness is far less intrusive than cool white, and a steady setting rather than a twinkle or chase mode will stop your peripheral vision being pulled sideways every two seconds mid-raid.
Why a Small Artificial Tree Is the Right Call
A real tree in a gaming room is a bad idea on several counts. Needles get into keyboard switches and never come out. It needs watering, which means a water container on the floor near a lot of expensive electronics. And the shape changes over the month, which is irrelevant to most people and quietly annoying if you have arranged the room precisely.
An artificial tree stays put, drops nothing, and comes in sizes that suit a room already full of desk, chair, shelving and a PC the size of a small fridge.
Desktop and half-height trees are the obvious choice for a setup room. A slim 5ft or 6ft tree works if you have floor space in a corner. Either way, Dobbies and similar ranges carry enough small and slim profiles that you are not forced into something that dominates the room.
The Electrical Bit, Which Actually Matters Here
Gaming setups are already running close to the edge on sockets. A PC, two or three monitors, speakers, a capture card, a router, phone chargers and a desk lamp are frequently feeding off one or two wall outlets through a daisy chain of extension leads that has grown organically over three years.
Adding Christmas lights to that is where people get into trouble. Not because fairy lights draw much power, modern LEDs draw almost nothing, but because the chain is already overloaded and the tree lights are the thing that gets plugged into the one remaining socket on a strip that was never rated for what is already on it.
Count what is actually on each extension lead. Do not plug one extension into another. Keep cables out from under the chair mat and the desk wheels, which chew through insulation faster than you would think. RoSPA’s seasonal home safety advice covers the electrical side in plain terms and is worth the five minutes before you start plugging things in.
RGB Already Solved Half of This
There is a decent argument that a gaming room is already the most decorated room in the house for eleven months of the year, and that the festive upgrade is mostly a question of changing a colour profile.
Red and green on the case fans and the keyboard. A warm amber on the bias lighting behind the monitor instead of the usual white. Most ecosystems let you save a profile, so you can flip the whole room into Christmas mode and back again without reconfiguring anything.
It is cheap, it does not add a single cable, and it does not take up desk space, which in most setups is the scarcest resource in the room.
Decorating the Shelf, Not the Desk
Desk space is for peripherals. The shelf above or behind is where decoration belongs.
A small tree at one end, a couple of baubles tucked among the figures and game cases you already have up there, and a short string of warm lights along the back edge will do more for the room than anything placed on the desk itself, where it will be in the way by day two and relocated to the floor by day four.
If you stream, this also means your decorations sit in frame behind you rather than in the foreground, which looks considerably more deliberate on camera.
Cable Management Is Still Cable Management
You have, presumably, spent time routing cables behind the desk so the room does not look like the back of a server rack. Do not undo that in December.
Run the tree lights along the same channels as everything else. Use the same clips or sleeves. Put the tree near an existing outlet rather than running a new lead across the floor to it. Twenty minutes of thought here means the setup still looks tidy on the 25th rather than looking like decoration was bolted onto it as an afterthought, which it was.
A Timer Is Worth £8
The single best purchase in this entire article is a cheap plug timer or smart plug for the tree lights.
Nobody wants to crawl under a desk to unplug fairy lights at two in the morning after a session that ran long. Set them to come on at four and off at midnight and never think about it again, which also handles the safety advice about not leaving decorative lighting on overnight without requiring you to remember anything.
What to Avoid Entirely
Tinsel near fans. It gets drawn into intake fans with remarkable efficiency and wrapping itself around a fan bearing is exactly as bad as it sounds.
Fake snow spray anywhere near a PC. It is an aerosol that leaves a sticky residue, and that residue plus dust equals a filter you will be scraping rather than rinsing.
Candles on the desk. Obvious, but every year someone puts a scented candle beside a machine with a glass side panel and several thousand pounds of components behind it.
Anything heavy on top of the monitor. Monitor arms and stands are rated for the monitor, not for the monitor plus a decorative figure that falls off at 3am.
If the Room Is Also the Bedroom
A great many setups live in a bedroom, and there the lighting advice changes slightly. Anything bright enough to be festive in the evening is bright enough to interfere with sleep if it is still on at midnight.
A timer handles most of it. Beyond that, keep the tree out of your direct line of sight from the pillow, and avoid cool white entirely in a room you sleep in, since it is the colour temperature least suited to winding down.
Enjoy the Downtime
The point of all this is that two weeks of long evenings with nothing scheduled is the best gaming window of the year, and a room that feels like December rather than like a slightly dusty office makes it noticeably better.
Get the tree out of the reflection arc, keep the sockets sensible, put it on a timer, and then go and finally play the thing you bought in November.
