The Ghost of Christmas Past accosted me without warning again the other night as I was leaving my parent’s house. Sure enough, the Christmas lights are up- – a little lower this year so Dad didn’t have to teeter precariously on the ladder. My parents are in their 80s.
Ah, the lights. They play a part in nearly every Christmas memory, don’t they? When I was very young and we lived in the old house next door, the lights were important to both Mom and Grandma. Back then we had one ancient string that went dark each time one bulb went out. Those worthy matriarchs got rid of it and the next success was actually placing the colored bulbs in a pattern. It was important to my mom to have them arranged just right – the same importance as choosing a symmetrical tree.
One year Grandma got electric candles to put in the window, not the standard group of three, but a special grouping of seven – in her thinking, the perfect number. I never did quite understand the blue bulbs for flames, but blue was the fashionable color that year-and for a decade thereafter until the bulbs finally burned out. We children would start looking for the lights the minute we crested the 12th Street hill. Lights in the window meant Grandma was home.
When we moved to the new house, a string or two of lights went with us. It took several years, but finally my folks had a strand long enough to border the entire roof. Multi-colored lights on the tree cast a warm and romantic glow. Is it the tree, the lights or the warm romantic glow that figures into memories of courtships and beaux? Dear to memory are the morning conversations and guessing games with my little brother, late evening hot chocolate and fudge and sharing our fondest wish lists – all of which took place in the warmth of Christmas Lights.
Lights. Music. They may be a bit out-of-date and shabby, but when the Ghost of Christmas past takes you by the hand unbidden and escorts you down memory lane, what warm and sentimental scenes do you revisit? Look at the Lights
