The particular chemistry of Christmas lights

Opinion

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This article was published 24/12/2024 (294 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The best of Christmas lights, for me, are the loneliest ones. The single field-standing beacon-tree, wrapped in one strand of red lights, or perhaps two, the tree shaking in the wind so that the lights on the branch-tips draw small patterns against the black of the night. A tree out at the end of a long, hidden, snow-buried tunnel line of extension cords, the meadow on all sides of it flattened down by snow, the glow of the lights thrown out across the white surface in an uneven circle.

Or one strand of green sparks along the line of a winter-dark eave, the line slightly out of true as the weight of the bulbs pulls them downward between the nails that hold them in place. Maybe, in a pinch, both.

I don’t know why. I realize, obviously, that a spectacular display of Christmas lights takes extreme levels of time and effort and dedication.

But on December mornings, walking to work, my eyes are drawn to the simplest displays.

There are houses that yell; there are houses that whisper — does that make sense?

And the whispers seem more dedicated to the seriousness of their responsibilities. One of an odd sort of Christmas rules I’ve collected.

Like, that if lights are going to blink, then they should be one bulb or two, not the whole string, tripping on and off as if short-circuited. I want the individual telegraph of one finger on the key, sending its message imperative.

There were, for a while, on a Christmas tree I remember from long ago, three or four bulbs that had some mechanism that made bubbles push through liquid to the tips of the bulb. I have no idea what that strange alchemy was. I just remember, as a child, hunting through the branches to find the bubblers. I would never have wanted to have a whole string of them, bubbling mindlessly like some carnival parade.

Obviously, I can be arbitrary and difficult to get along with.

Almost every year, I get to spend part of the Christmas season at a place you could almost describe as being at the end of the road — there are just two houses beyond ours on the road that’s barely plowed, beyond the internet and with a huge wood stove, trade-named “Defiant,” to get us through the winter nights if the power goes.

We’ll get there late this year, but I might still put the lights up.

A single strand of lights. Perhaps, two.

And maybe a big, white, yelling moon will come up through the spruce tops and look down, curious, on that brave little pine tree of lights sending its signal outwards, and off in the spruce browse, the tiny northern saw-whet owl we sometimes hear will hoot his one-note child’s recorder song as he hunts for mice in the thrown-off needles and cones under the skirts of the bottom branches. If the coyote choir doesn’t sing and yip, the rabbit-dog beagles will, two roads north of us and pacing their compound, always ready to yell.

I’ve written about this next part before, in a different newspaper long ago, because the words sink into me so well, because they create the feeling of encompassing that I always feel at the end of the Christmas season, when it’s just about gone.

In Dylan Thomas’s A Children’s Christmas in Wales, a group of children out carolling and head to a large dark house at the end of a winding drive.

“One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wenceslas looked out. On the Feast of Stephen. … And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house…”

That’s why a single strand of lights in a bravely straight pine tree matters.

One string of lights, slinging hope out into the darkness, the kind of lights that look as though they have been hung by nobody we knew. Calling into the darkness with its version of a small, dry eggshell voice.

And after all the presents and missteps and overeating, after the foot-dragging and missed chances and doubts and fears, I will suddenly be stuffed with the best of the season, and know for precisely one day, maybe two, that the world could be full, and good.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at Russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca