Christmas Gone But Lights Remain

Fortunately, people keep their Christmas lights up for awhile after Christmas, and we made it cross the border on Monday night to see what the Canadians had for us. Really quite a lot. The amount of cumulative work to get that many lights up on that many houses is pretty impressive. It's not even half the houses, but it's probably a third of them. Which is a lot of houses with a lot of lights.

Apparently the big new thing in Christmas decorations since icicle lights (in my view, the very highest point of aesthetic decorations) is giant blow-up figures, most of which look as if they're about to take off to make a late appearance in the Thanksgiving Day Macy's Parade. I'm not sure that they are an improvement, except for their capacity to take up a lot of space.

On the other hand, the mixed blue/red LED strings of lights provide a strangely intense sense of color, with a feeling of mystery about them, more like a solstice evocation than Christmas, though. Other light bonanzas seem not so much festive as like a visit to downtown Tokyo. Candy cane shaped lights seemed a new entry in the field, but I'm not sure they work that well, although we did see one wall of green net lights with lighted candy canes at the bottom that really stood out. The candy canes looked sort of like tree trunks for the green net hedge.

We don't do Christmas lights at our house, although we do have some 'colored winter lights,' which get turned on when daylight savings ends and then get turned off when daylight savings starts. And they're always on their respective trees, so we just have to turn on the timer switch when the right time arrivess

For a lot of those light shows that we came across the other night, I imagined a wife calling out in early December, "Joe, it's time to put up the Christmas lights." And then Joe goes to the basement to find the box and spreads them around with all the enthusiasm that my father used to show during the annual placement of storm windows for the winter. But for many other light shows we saw, it was more like some other Joe was saying, 'Come on, kids, let's put them everywhere; let's light up the sky!' And they sure did.