“You know what we’re doing tonight?” I asked the assembled at the dinner table … even an anxious dog. “We’re going to see CHRISTMAS LIGHTS!”
And many merry “yees” and “yahoos” were heard all around (even from an anxious dog.)
For nothing says Christmas like cruising neighborhoods in search of the spectacular, audacious, gaudy, inspiring, kilowatt-consuming Christmas light displays.
It’s a serious and time-honored tradition in my house — one that goes back to my own childhood and similar adventures with my dad. What a joy to now share it with my daughter.
When I was young, Christmas just wasn’t Christmas until my father loaded my brother and me in to his mid-70s Mercury Monarch — tan like expired luncheon meat and as flashy as cardboard — so we could go in search of lights. They weren’t hard to find, especially in Tampa’s Latin neighborhoods that I knew so well. You just looked for the glow on the horizon and listened for the sound of strained power line transformers buzzing like electrified hornets’ nests.
There you found a blinding display of candy-colored lights marching across rooftops and snaking up anything that could support a string of Christmas bulbs. It was like the Fourth of July in December. No bush was too small, and no tree too big. Drowned in iridescence, many would burst into flames from the heat, only to get quickly stomped out so new strings could be run in their smoldering place. A holiday phoenix.
There were few sights more glorious than the realm of these Christmas light junkies. The bulbs seemed organic, as if they grew out of the ground like illuminated weeds taking over anything in sight. Neighbors spent months planning how to outdo one another. A 20-foot-tall baby Jesus? Too much? No, man, not enough! Throw in parachuting reindeer and a Santa-Elvis with go-go girls and a neon sleigh. Elf villages and locomotives steaming through the yard. Giant plywood cutouts of Frosty and sugar plum ferries and toy soldiers. Fake snow in Tampa’s 80-degree Christmas heat, and mangers that looked like Vegas casinos in all their shimmering chaos.
With noses pressed to the glass and the windows steaming up, we “ooh-ed” and “ahh-ed” from one house to the next.
“Did you see that?” one of us would yell. “It was a mechanical elf with a flamethrower. Now this is Christmas!”
My father would smile.
We would return home sunburned, and days later I could still close my eyes and see it all burned into my retinas. What good times.
Maybe it’s because we were Christmas light-deprived at home. My mother never appreciated Christmas lights, and thought it tacky to string them across her house. I’ve never asked my father, but I think that may have been a contributing factor to their divorce.
No matter, we got our fill on those annual jaunts, one of my favorite holiday traditions as a kid.
What is it that makes a tradition like that so special? To many, a tradition is something you do regularly, year after year. But that alone doesn’t make it memorable. Was it the lights, burned forever in the depths of my cerebral cortex?
Or was it quite simply the three of us all sharing in that wonderment together? My dad wasn’t just going through the motions — dutifully toting along two sons because of some parental obligation. Rather, he was a kid with us, mesmerized by it all. And isn’t that what the holidays are all about, being together as you revel in it all?
Now I carry it on. My daughter turns 5 this Christmas, and this is the prime age for Christmas lights — just old enough to appreciate the spectacle, yet still young enough to be completely dazzled by it.
We all “ooh-ed” and ahh-ed” as we combed street after street in search of the next big find. And when we found one — one like an atom bomb going off — by golly, the smiles cracked open and the car steamed up from the excitement. Even the anxious dog.
Isn’t that what Christmas is all about!