Christmas Lights

            Last week I walked into my woods with a bow saw and, with apologies and thanks to the druid, cut down a little cedar tree. As I was hauling it into the house and setting it up, I thought what a strange custom it is to bring a live tree inside the house and decorate it with trinkets. It looks so out of place, its limbs holding up not snow or birds' nests but paper stars and ceramic Santa Clauses, golf-ball Rudolfs and metal snowflakes.

            When all the decorations were on the tree, I refilled the eggnog, plugged in the Christmas tree lights, and turned off the house lights. And then everything fell into place. My Christmas tree was joining the Christmas lights of millions of other households around the country in making a statement to the world at large, a statement I am grateful to be a part of.

            It's the statement of Christmas lights. I live way up a mountain, where winter evenings descend with thick velvet darkness. Tonight the rain pours down relentlessly enough to alarm Noah. No stars twinkle in the dark heavens tonight. No moon, tonight, gives luster of midday to the objects below. The darkness, outside, is complete.

            Inside, my Christmas tree sparkles and glitters with its spirals of lights. They reflect in the dark windows, tripling the effect. If anyone were to drive by (an impossibility, since the house doesn't sit on a road), maybe the Christmas tree lights, shining through the windows, would suffice for my statement of light within the dark.

            Driving up my road at night, I silently thank every household that has put up Christmas lights and given us this statement. I silently beg the people who haven't strung lights around their houses and yards to do so. "Don't give in to despair," I plead. "Show us that you, too, are a part of celebration, joy, and good will." It doesn't have to have anything to do with the religion of Christmas, but it has everything to do with the symbolism of light. I exult in the extravagance of light at Christmas: icicles hanging from eaves, swirls of lights around trunks of trees, lighted silhouettes of deer lowering their heads to graze – something, anything, to say, "I refuse to give in to dark times. I refuse to let cynicism and bitterness win."

            That's why we bring a living tree into the house and string it with lights. That's why, although at any other time of the year I decry lights that abolish the dark and the poetry of the night, I join the communal effort, for this one brief season, in banishing the metaphorical darkness with the symbolism of our lights: "I keep the magic in life and a light in dark times. I combat cynicism and bitterness with a belief in the power of all that is good, beautiful, and uplifting."

            It doesn't take much. Just a string of lights, a little electricity, and a heart that can still rejoice.