Little lights.
Every year, at this time, there is a miracle of light where I live.
All the houses along the creek decorate their docks. The houses themselves, with few exceptions, remain dark. But the creek side is resplendent with light. One house even has a web of golden lights strung from tree to tree, high up in the branches and down to the ground. The glow is magnified and multiplied by the reflection in the water, and it is really quite something.
A few houses down, a giant Santa presides over wildlife and watercraft from the top of a dock’s sun deck. Bright Christmas red in the daylight, he glows and waves to the cars on the bridge at night.
There are twinkling palm trees and sea walls lined in blue and green, strings of red and purple, green and yellow spiraling around pilings, and Christmas trees built entirely of lights standing out at the ends of piers.
It’s all gorgeous.
There’s no prize for the best decoration. No reason for any neighbor to vie with any other. They do it because it’s beautiful and because people love it. When you get right down to it, nobody living in the house actually spends that much time looking at their own lights. And no one house is all that spectacular by itself.
We enjoy the totality of the experience. The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.
It is lovely, every night, to see the lights come on, house by house, many of them on timers with photocells, just waiting for the sun to set enough to switch on the power. It is lovely every year to see who has installed something new and what it is.
It is true that we do enjoy looking at them. I can’t really speak for everyone, but I venture to guess that we enjoy, more, the thought of the cars crossing the bridge night after night, a sudden glimpse of brightness out the side window, “Look, Johnny! Look!,” and parental hands pointing while little round eyes stare quickly, greedily, at a beauty that cannot be grasped, cannot be savored, but is offered up by a community for no better reason than because it’s pretty and because we can.
When I am old and feeble and forgetful, I hope I will be able still to see the twinkling lights of Christmas. I do love them so.
