For the love of St. Nicholas, do not let anyone hang holiday decorations willy-nilly about the workplace lest you render the office Wi-Fi net as discombobulated as Santa's sleigh without Rudolph.

That's the gist of a warning from wireless-LAN monitoring vendor AirMagnet, which last week "announced the results of a recently conducted survey measuring wireless signal strength in a standard office setting both before and after introducing a change in the office environment -- holiday decorations."

Bah humbug, says my go-to guy on such matters, but we'll get to his complaint about "the stupidest press release I have ever received" in just a moment.

First, AirMagnet has data to share in its "media alert," as the company's tests "showed the decorations had a significant impact on the Wi-Fi network, with: signal strength decreased by 25%; signal deterioration increased over distance by one-third; and, signal distribution uneven in some locations, deteriorating signal strength by an additional 10%."

Maybe they didn't hang the tinsel strand by strand. I've always been a strand-by-strand guy myself.

But the details are really beside the point, says Joel Snyder, a senior partner at Opus One in Tucson, Ariz., and a member of the Network World Lab Alliance.

"Holiday decorations, like any change in the environment, can make wireless better, or they can make it worse," Snyder says. "To try and instill fear into people, suggesting that they should be afraid to put up holiday decorations, is ridiculous. Worrying about such degradation (which, by the way, could be an improvement as well) is silly, and it's temporary, and it's slight."