Christmas Lights - Original Essay

by Emma Redmer

Another one I wrote in 2012 that's based after a prompt from Helium. I still use the small, slender twinkling lights, though different ones now - the ones from college that I mention in the essay finally died about two years ago. It also still takes me a while for me to wrap them around the tree on my own, which is partly why I always invite a friend over to help decorate the rest of it.

“Ouch!”

I rub my foot. I just stepped on one of the lights that are supposed to go on my Christmas tree. I pull out the rope to inspect it. Nope, nothing broken. All the lights are as they should be. To be honest, I really need to replace this strand. I’ve used the same lights since college, and that was over ten years ago.

I can’t help thinking that putting the lights on the tree looked so much easier when Mom and Dad did it. They always had a big tree, with many strands of beautiful white lights that twinkled among Mom’s vintage glass balls. The lights were the same slender models I have now throughout my childhood and into the 90s. Sometime after 2000, Mom decided that the new lights with the larger bulbs were more practical and economical, not to mention much easier to thread onto the tree. Oh, they’re still pretty, but they glow a little differently than those tiny, twinkling lights.

My family wouldn’t decorate the outside of the house with lights until the late 90s. I don’t know why we never bothered. Maybe it was too much for Mom to handle on her own. My stepfather is a commercial fisherman, and he’d spend a lot of the holiday season on the ocean, making enough money for gifts for a family of six people. Maybe she just thought decorating the house inside from the bathroom to the den was more than enough.

At any rate, my father finally caved into pressure from my brother and his own desire to compete with the neighbors and started doing “exterior illumination” on his days between work trips. Thank heavens he had my brother and mother with him to assure that he never got as carried away as Clark Grizwauld. I have fond memories of coming home from college to a split-level house outlined in lights, with a netting of lights on the bushes, and the beautiful (then) new icicle strands hanging off the roof like dripping glitter. The effect was marvelous and elegant, especially in a New Jersey neighborhood where other houses went the Grizwauld route and covered themselves in every lighting effect known to man.

Christmas lights mean more to me than just good memories. For someone who works late and relies on her bike for transportation, they have a practical use. It’s a lot less scary riding home after a late work shift when every house in the neighborhood is lit up like the Fourth of July. It’s like a beacon leading you home after a hard day of dealing with frantic holiday customers.

The lights were especially beautiful about a week before Christmas 2009. On December 19th, the East Coast was hit by a massive blizzard. I live close to work anyway, so I just walked there and back. I worked from 10 until 5 that day. Despite the weather being even worse when I walked home, it was exhilarating to be out in it. When I arrived at the street just off the ramp into town, I literally gasped at the sight. It looked like an old-fashioned Christmas card or a Thomas Kinkade painting. The lights shown against the softly falling snow and the navy-blue night. Coupled with the Christmas party we’d had at work and the presents waiting for me at home from a friend, it felt like the most Christmassy day of my entire life.

No matter how much of a pain they may be to wind around the tree, staple onto the roof, or even plug into the wall, holiday lights are a reminder that there is always a little warmth in our hearts and minds, even during the darkest of seasons.

And that you should never step on a small colored light while barefoot.