What Are The Lights Of Christmas Meant To Say?

My wife and I tend to decorate simply each December, now that our five children have grown, flown, and are on their own. They will decorate their homes as we used to do when they were single and at home.

Christmas is not only about the birth of the Christ child, it is about all children.

It is good to take a ride by bus or car and see the holiday lights in December before they all have to come down by some unwritten rule when the New Year has been rung in and life somewhat sadly returns to "normal."

I wonder, though, as I drive around enjoying the displays, some simple, some seemingly overdone even ostentatious: "What are the lights of December meant to say?"

There is normally no prize for the house with the most lights twinkling, flashing, blazing, and perhaps making it difficult for some neighbors to drift off to sleep when outside it appears that an entire fire department augmented by the local police department with all their lights flashing is trying to save the neighborhood.

I know it is not mandatory to outline the roof with colored bulbs and imitation icicles, as well as the front porch, walkway, and the lawn with those other figures some celebrate, such as Santa Claus, Frosty The Snowman, Rudolph and the rest of the flying reindeer. But quite often it does appear that we need reminders of them as well as the child whose birth so many recall.

Not so long ago, in a different December time, I was coming home from an errand and I noticed a short, forlorn, evergreen decorated modestly on a lawn bare of snow. I stopped and took a photo, thinking it might grace a seasonal card with the caption "It's the thought that counts."

Thinking back to that image, and the probable love one or more children probably had for that scrawny little Christmas tree growing at the center of their small, front lawn, so frail that it could hardly support its modest decorations and the electric line for its few lights, I wonder if there might be any different holiday spirit I could detect, if I were sitting in that family's living room on Christmas Day and in the living room of the most gorgeously lit home a few blocks away.

What are we celebrating each year in December?

Surely it isn't our street, our house, the end of another year of good and sometimes not so good happenings.

I rather think it is what the decorators of that one small little evergreen tree had in mind when they dressed it up to look its humble best.

_______

Copyright 2012 Demas W. Jasper All right reserved.