Some of my fondest childhood memories are of homes decorated for Christmas. I remember driving slowly up and down the snow-choked city streets of Chicago checking out all the incredible displays in a neighborhood where some of my relatives lived. Each street had a theme like Santa Street, Rudolph Road and Frosty Lane. To not participate would have been deemed almost un-American. Today, values have changed and since forgoing holiday lighting displays isn’t considered treasonous, not nearly as many people seem to go for external displays
of illumination.
Candy Cane Lane here in Idaho Falls attempts to get a whole neighborhood into the holiday spirit but even at its best, it doesn’t hold a plastic Noel candle to how people used to decorate in the Mad Men era of my youth. The blinking red lights of the wind towers help add to the holiday cheer, but the fact that they pulse year round dims their celebratory nature a bit.
When it comes to holiday lighting displays, there are two basic groups of people: those that do and those that don’t. The latter group is made up people who are either too cheap to pay the few extra bucks worth of electricity or have given up trying to figure out how to repair strands of burnt out lights. I avoid this category by always buying leftover lights the day after Christmas when they are marked down 75 percent. That way I have new working lights when I finally get around to decorating in the snowstorms that always hit right after Thanksgiving. A new excuse you might hear is that they are trying to help save the planet by not adding their few strands of lights to the impact of global warming.
Those folks that decorate can be broken into two camps: the tasteful and the tacky. Some of the tasteful folks are really just the lucky ones that throw out an obligatory line or two that just happened to be still working. Once covered by snow, they have a subtle, understated look that makes them look classy. Others get a little more energetic and supplement tasteful lights with a few plywood cut-outs of the three kings or reindeer.
Then there is the Clark Griswold faction. These are the folks that believe there is no limit to what decorations can be used in celebration of the birth of Jesus. Dancing electric reindeers on the roof, animated Santa’s workshops displays on the front lawns and no less than 200 strands of flashing lights are all fair game. These are the people that the neighbors all hate. Their displays are so tacky they reduce property values and their garishness draws gawkers by the bunches resulting in demo derby events nightly.
While not overly ornate, I usually put up more than the average amount of lights. I never get too carried away, but I try to be festive, especially given how dark the winters get here.
We used to have a dear neighbor lady who would ask us to keep our lights on past the traditional Three Kings ending date. She said the colorful lights helped cheer her through the worst of the winter. She has since passed, but in her memory, we still keep our lights lit until the end of January. While my lights may not be fancy, I’m sure people enjoy coming across them on cold nights in January. So let’s all brighten up the IF winter a bit and keep our lights lit just a little bit longer this year. I don’t think global warming will mind the help