Meg and I are the same age, give or take three months. Many years ago, when we were in seventh or eighth grade, we sat side-by-side on a car trip to see the Christmas lights in McAdenville, NC. Our parents had gathered both families together for the adventure–the long drive up from South Carolina, the slow crawl through the city to see the lights, and the drive home that was all too short because once it was over, I wouldn’t see Meg again for a while. My strongest recollection is that McAdenville only used three colors of lights–white, red, and green. Even today, those colors predominate. No yellow. No blue. No orange. How did that happen? McAdenville was a Southern Mill Town (as so many were in those days) and, according to my father, the Company provided the lights and specified the colors.
On other mid-December nights, my parents would drive us though our own town (whether it was Winnsboro, Easley, Columbia, or York) to look at the Christmas lights. Some homes were unlit. Some only had a tree in the living room, or a ceramic tree on a tabletop. We lived in the era of the aluminum tree and saw plenty of them glowing in other homes. Some homes put white lights on door wreathes or garlands on the porch. A few had lights along the gutters and wrapped around the bushes. The Charlie Brown Christmas special was first broadcast when we lived in Columbia, and we started calling the most-decorated houses “Snoopy’s Dog House”. Some were tasteful. Others were garish. But we enjoyed the tours. Colored lights were as much a part of Christmas as the midnight Christmas Eve service or driving across the river in Columbia to see the life-size Nativity that one of the motels erected each year.
That brings me to this past Christmas. Meg and I don’t have grandchildren and my own children’s Christmases are complicated enough without adding a 20-hour round trip. That leaves us without any compelling reason to put up a tree. My personal feelings about Christmas are complicated by the fact that I was an acquisitive little kid–more Daffy than Bugs–and I don’t feel good about that. So I wasn’t in a Christmas mood. We had a handful of presents and cards on the mantel, but nothing else. Meg didn’t feel particularly Christmas-y either. We talked about how we felt and what things had been like when we were kids. That was on Christmas Eve, and after the conversation I went up to my storeroom and pulled out a short string of LED Christmas lights. I didn’t do anything fancy. I just plugged them in on one side of the fireplace and draped them across the mantel to the other side.
The effect was startling. Somehow, the colored lights made everything feel more like Christmas. No snow came to help–it was 67 F on Christmas Day. No carolers came–they don’t wander country roads. But a string of bright colored lights made a difference. It changed how we felt. It changed what we did. It made Christmas feel like it had when we were kids. All it took was a string of colored lights.