Back in the day when I held a real job instead of being retired, I remember one December evening riding on a shuttle bus to an event at the governor’s residence with a number of media folks from around the state. We were all involved in journalism either in newspaper, TV, radio, or as freelance writers, and we joined together on this mode of transportation for this one night to enjoy a holiday get together.
As I sat there gazing out the window into the dark yards of unsuspecting Nashvillians, I overheard two of my fellow media types talking about how they had done only minimal decorating. They surmised that they did so due to the current economy, and that they just didn’t wish for their yards to resemble “Whoville.” I remember those remarks to this day, and as my grandfather often said, “They really stuck in my craw!”
Recently, I finished once again turning my front yard and home into a display of lights and holiday gaudiness on a day that the winds blew out of the north and I, too, could have used an excuse of some type to keep my lighted reindeer in the barn for another year.
However, I’ve been a part of the “Gaudy Christmas Decoration Society” for years, and the economy has never really figured into my reasoning for lighting our hillside home with lights. All I have to do is reflect back to when I was a child growing up on our rural countryside farm and remember a very special Christmas shopping trip made by my mother to truly understand my fascination with outside lighting. I’ve told this story before, but I think this year it deserves to be told again. Our country needs some brightness, and there’s no better time to do so than at Christmas, when there’s no time for excuses.
In the late fifties, Christmas lights on doorways and houses were something you might have seen in nearby cities, but not on the farms in our area. Of course, everyone placed their lighted live cedar Christmas trees by a window, or as close to a window as possible, so it could be seen from the outside, but yard decorations were just not that prevalent back then. I remember the visits to town at Christmas time and seeing the storefronts full of lights and Christmas decorations. The homes along Murfreesboro’s Main Street were always beautifully decorated with evergreens and lights, as they are today. As a small child, those homes were a wonderment of holiday excitement and hopes.
One year, about three weeks before Christmas Day, my mother and father arrived home from a trip into town. As they unpacked their purchases from their trip to town, they pulled out two long boxes decorated with Christmas trees and sporting the GE logo on the front. The boxes had come from the Firestone store, where my father bought everything.
Each box contained a strand of 12 outdoor Christmas lights. Of course, they were the kind that if one burnt out, they all would go out, but they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. My mother had saved back some special Christmas money to buy the lights to add some holiday cheer to our small Tennessee farmhouse.
My father cut cedar greenery and helped us nail it around the front door. Then he and my sister attached the lights to each side of the doorway and ran a brown extension cord to the single light bulb socket on the porch. Each bulb was checked and the lights tested to see if they worked. After passing every test, our outside display waited for sundown.
I’ll never forget standing in that cold December night in our front yard as my mother turned on the porch light switch. It was as big of an event to me as the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center in New York City.
When the lights came on, their blues, greens, reds, and yellows blended just right with the cedar greenery on the doorway. As a small boy, it signaled to me that the Christmas season had arrived.
For years, we used those lights from the Firestone store. They soon lost the paint from around the bulbs, and you could see light through the cracks, but they still announced the arrival of the season to our rural countryside.
So, I guess that’s why I still
put up my Christmas lights
each year: to announce to others that the season has arrived at
our house, and to renew those same feelings I felt standing in that cold front yard many Christmases ago - a feeling of belonging and of being loved by a family that cared to express
the joy of the holiday season. Merry Christmas!