Christmas Lite

Dear Friends, I hope you like the new look of my blog page. I am very excited about the illustration by my dear friend, Bernie Lyon in Vancouver - thanks, B! Please check out more of her wonderful drawings at her web site - see link below. You might have noticed that I didn't post a blog last week. That was because I was fiddling with the Blogpsot templates to try to get even this far with this page design. It exhausted me. As some of you know, I am a techno feeb when it comes to computer fiddling. I still might opt for my own web site one of these days, but I'd have to hire a twelve-year old to help me. Your comments on design are welcome and in the meantime, please enjoy this week's blog!

 

It seems to me that when the calendar turns to the first of December it ought to be accompanied by the sound of pealing church bells, or maybe jingling sleigh bells. You can hear it, too, right? You know, like in old movies; the page tears away to DECEMBER 1 and the scene opens on the month of merriment.

Among my favorite things about this season are the lights. As soon as Halloween is over, I start looking for a house that has the outdoor lights ready to go. There’s one in every neighborhood. And although we’ll say, “OH, WAAAAY too early! What are they thinking?!?” I regard it as a herald of things to come and am secretly glad to see those little twinkles in the darkness.

Every weekend thereafter other houses will get decked out, especially if the weather is good (“Got to get those lights up before the weather turns bad.”) until December arrives, and houses throughout the neighborhood will sparkle with everyone’s personal interpretation of the holiday light display. Some are modest and polite, some ghastly and totally over the top, and everything in between. We once had across-the-street neighbors who draped their house in thousands of red lights. It was so glaringly red it seemed to throb like an infected wound. They had a tiny sound system that played “Jingle Bell Rock” until 3 am in kind of tinny, high-pitched “nee-nee-nee, nee-nee-nee, nee nee nee nee…” sounds that would hurt a dog’s ears and our power dimmed every time they put their lights on. It was tasteless, but you had to give them points for spirit.

I think there is something totally magical about illuminating the night at this cold, dark time of year. Ken and I usually go on a light tour one or two nights before Christmas. Up streets and down again, looking for the most spectacular display. It might be one of those houses with various figures of clashing scale – like a giant penguin beside a teeny-tiny Santa and reindeers beside a bunch of those half-sized, wire framed, animated deer beside those colossal blow-up Snoopies. Or a house with the giant fir tree out front decked from top to trunk in colored lights. Or a street where a dozen houses in a row are all lit up like, well, like a Christmas tree. We’ll go home again and make cocoa or pour a glass of Port feeling like we’ve had a great evening of cheap entertainment.

So now that December is upon us, we flipped the switch on the clear twinkle lights that trace our house outline. I hung the wreath on the door and stuck some greenery in the planters on the front steps. A lot of neighbors around us decorated their houses this weekend as well, just in time for our city of Oakwood’s charming tradition. Events like this always remind me how lucky we are to live here. I mean, you’ve got to love a place that holds a community festival in the park, including hay rides, music and Christmas tree lighting, and has City workers line the boulevards on two major streets with “luminaria.” Oakwood encourages residents to do likewise at curbsides in front of their houses and even hands out the white bags filled with sand to be lit from within by candles.  Every house on our entire street had “luminaria” out after dark last night. We stood back, our eyes all aglow. Our hearts as well.