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“Mommy, look! It looks like a candy house!”
“Look at the sparkles, Mommy!”
My neighborhood is resplendent with Christmas lights, wreaths and garlands. Even the lamposts are decorated with red ribbons, lights, and a sprig of plastic pine. It’s a nice change from our neighborhood in Pittsburgh, where few of our neighbors put up any lights — a habit I presume is formed not from a lack of Yuletide spirit (although, granted, there were some Jewish families on the block) but simply because our 1930s cottages simply lacked good outdoor access to electricity.
Now we live in Twinkletown. However, given that we are on the East Bench, it’s an austere, tasteful Twinkletown. There are no blow-up nylon balloon Santas, animatronic reindeer, or hard plastic snowmen. There’s one — just one — house on the block with a row of electric candy canes, but it’s very small. Nothing blinks.
Therefore, I didn’t feel bad at all about investing in only three little strings of white lights to run along the roof of our porch. No muss, no fuss. The hooks were already there, we just had to hang the lights on them. In my theory, Christmas light displays shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to set up. But I was concerned that my kids wouldn’t feel the same way.
I grew up on Army posts, where there were rules about how many lights could be put on residential quarters. No lawn ornaments, and only a few strings of lights. There’s no room for the Electric Light Parade in the Army. But as a little kid, I always kind of longed for something more — something rainbowy to drape over our trees and bushes, to transform our practical-yet-mundane quarters into a fairyland.
So I was worried that my kids would be disappointed with our tiny amount of twink. But I needn’t have worried.
“Mommm! Come see the lights that Daddy put up!” Eleanor cheered and twirled as Jeffrey proudly displayed Brian’s work. William clapped his little hands. And I remembered that any amount of twinkle is special, no matter how small. It’s our house; it’s special to our kids.
Last night I drove Jeffrey home from a Christmas party, and I pointed out lights from the windows. We passed the candy cane house.
“Jeffrey, look! Does that house look like it’s made out of candy?”
“Yeah, Mom! It looks yummy!”
Then we turned the corner to our home, and I noticed that a third of the lights had somehow gone out. I winced as I pulled into the driveway.
“Mommy, do you know what our house looks like?”
“No, Jeffrey. What?”
“I think it looks like the way it did on Christmas night.”
I puzzled over this for a moment. Does he realize that our house didn’t exist in ancient Bethlehem?
“Jeffrey, do you mean that our house looks like a stable?”
“No Mom,” he whispered. “I think it looks like the sky full of stars on Christmas night.”
He fluttered his fingers in the air to demonstrate, and I think my heart fluttered, too.
And I expect it will continue to do so for the next three weeks, or until we drop dead from exhaustion, whichever comes first.
Was Thanksgiving weekend just a week ago? It seems much farther away, I suppose mainly becauJse we took down our few Thanksgiving decorations and put up the Christmas stuff so quickly. My theory is: get the tree done as soon as possible, or it doesn’t happen at all.
Jeffrey was most interested in our creches — for the past several years, we have gone down to Ten Thousand Villages and picked out a nativity set from a different country. So far, we have creches from Peru, Indonesia, Maylasia, and Germany (uh . . . we found that at a thrift store). This year, we picked out a lovely one made of Kishi stone from Kenya.
All of this extra color and diversity must have inspired Jeffrey, because he immediately went to his room for a while before reemerging with a creche made of Legos. Joseph is a little Lego person inside, but he couldn’t find any more Lego people for Mary and Joseph, so they are represented by a flower topped with a yellow brick.
A flower — I am especially fond of this detail, since one of my favorite Christmas carols is “Lo, How A Rose is Blooming.”
Speaking of which, Eleanor is delighting in dancing around to the various carols and yuletide melodies I plunk out at the piano after dinner most evenings. When she isn’t dancing, she likes to sit on my lap and watch.
Funny thing is, no matter what I play — from the Nutcracker Suite to “Go Tell It on the Mountain” — she points at the music and says, “When I was a little girl, I learned how to sing this song in Spanish at my preschool!”
Oh, when she was a little girl, indeed!
