A Long Christmas

A great pleasure of living in a largely Episcopal community is the long celebration of Christmas, many folks waiting to remove decorations until after Twelfth Night, the traditional time of the wise men's visit to the infant Jesus. I grow older each year but feel younger living here, thanks to the decorated trees and outdoor lights some neighbors leave up just as my mother did. These small gifts make winter's deepest darkness easier to accept.

Personal note: While I don't have a Christmas tree, I leave up my light string all year long.

Let there be

lights!

North Carolina Arboretum

I Saw the Lights

One Thing I Love about Living in an Episcopal Town:

lingering Christmas lights, even after Twelfth Night

On My Return from the Library, This Happened

One the four does in my front yard greeted my deer statue.

(Or maybe she was just curious about the Christmas lights.)

Day 3: Another Way to Love the Camera

Inside looking out.

No other light.

Handheld.

And I just remembered that it's a touchscreen.

Oh, yes.

Santa's so good to me.

Happy Holidays!

New camera.

Handheld.

Night.

No flash.

Oh y-e-a-h.

S-w-e-e-e-e-e-t!

What Comes Down

outside

        and in.

I'm All About the 'Hood

Here's what I saw down the street when I got home at just-dark.

Despite what my Virginia-Anglican mother always said -- colored lights are tacky -- I thank my professor-neighbors for bringing light into darkness, joy into the season every year. 

From my porch, I look down, see the glow, and remember the thrill of childhood at Christmas.

Let There Be Bling!

Christmas has come and gone. Twelfth Night has come and gone. Even my neighbor has taken down her lovely lights, somewhat reluctantly.

("Not everyone approves of them," she told me, but I cheered, as I have every year, sometimes standing in my yard, alone, looking downhill, feeling warm and toasty inside).

And so I am pleased that a tree and some lights remain downtown thanks to . . . whatever . . . inertia, forgetfulness, or perhaps a kindred spirit's rebellion. 

Just look how they sparkle and shine! They bring heat to a cold winter's day!

Christmas Bling

Tree bling.

Yard and house bling.

Child bling.

Everything shines brighter at home for Christmas.

That Annual Itch

It's hard to find the kind of Christmas lights that make me tingle on the campus of an Episcopalian college. My staunchly Episcopal mother was a lights snob: only white and only tiny (never blinking or synching); all others were "tacky." Tiny white is pretty much what folks around do, if they do anything at all. (I can think of three exceptions, one down the street. But only three.)

Oh, how I love lights.

In New Orleans' City Park, a light fantasia reigns every Christmas season. Even without children in tow, folks find Celebration in the Oaks inspiring. When I lived in the city, I drove St. Charles every evening and marveled at the crisp white lights draped over stately mansions. Once, a friend who lived in the same Metairie neighborhood as Al Copeland, flashy founder of Popeye's, took me to see his display. He spent a fortune on Christmas decorations of the kind not only my mother would pooh-pooh, but of the kind even I found over-the-top tacky.

Another Christmas, when I was living in Birmingham, I was invited to a Christmas party that included a tour of Gardendale lights, including one house that lit up the entire neighborhood. Every window opened onto a special enclosed scene, and music blared. I would not have wanted to live near that house, but I sure enjoyed seeing it.

Tonight, feeling Christmas-lights bereft, I drove out of the parking lot at the Pig. Instead of pulling up to the highway, I stopped just short. The Amish Hippie's lights and light rain made just the kind of scene I have been missing.

Maybe I should drive over every night, just to scratch that Christmas itch.

Let There Be Lights

My mother was a purist when it came to Christmas lights: only white, only small, only on the tree and a few on the bridge to light the way for Santa's visitors, and no movement or sound.

She pronounced colored lights and displays "tacky," although as a family we did drive down to the two circles with their C-7-bulbed trees and cutout nutcracker decorations.

I wonder what she would think of the Christmas decorating craze that has characterized American consumer and popular culture in the decades since her death.  What, for example, what she make of the woman who does this every year?

Would she still mutter "Tacky" under her breath?  Or would she have come to love the celebratory spirit of a person who celebrates a season and shares it with others.

Though I have no fondness for the plastic store-bought scenes, I have to admit that I have shed my puritanical bias against showy Christmas lights.  The more, the merrier for me.

I celebrate the celebrants!

Lamplight

For as long as I can remember, I have loved the play of light: the light that slunk under the shades in my childhood bedroom, circling pools that wound through the fabric pulls; the light splotches in the creek, dappling water and minnow with leaf and sky; the Christmas lights on the bridge and the glass-porch tree with the house otherwise unlit; the startling, ghostly platter of silver moon reflected on the middle Tennessee countryside slathered with untrod snow that I glimpsed from a train window somewhere around 2 or 3 AM in January 1965; the light of my lamps in late night at home.

This is the light I love most now, a splattering of warm yellow on mahogany and Colombian art and Romanian runner and red couch and flowered rug, the light of reading before bed and of quiet at the end of a noisy day. The light makes me feel welcome in and of and to myself.

If I could be anything, I'd be a painter of light and shadow. If I could live anywhere, I'd reside inside the surface of a Caravaggio or a Rembrandt, bathed by light and shadow.

A Welcome Sight

What a lovely thing it is to come home in the evening to my home.

Tiny white lights have always pleased and calmed me. My mother never allowed colored lights on our Christmas tree, saying that "only common people" have colored lights. Ours were always white, and when they were invented, ours were always tiny. At night during Christmas season, I loved going into the living room alone, where I played carols, reading music from a little yellow and green book, on the piano my mother brought into the house. I then lay on the green rug in the living room and watched the twinkle of the tree on the large front porch, glassed in for winter. If I was lucky, Daddy had earlier lit a fire, which crinkled and popped behind me. If I close my eyes now, I can still see the beautiful white-and-green tiles, surrounding the fireplace. I remember Mother designing, painting, and firing them in the basement. (Six now form the top of a brass table Daddy made for me years ago.)

Somehow, subconsciously, the Christmas lights I hang all year long on my front porch echo my childhood, when I slept all night along, in a room on the first floor with my parents who loved me down a long hall and my brothers who loved me on the floor above.

Even though they aren't all still alive, they still love me and always will.