I am the person who turns off the lights. You know, the one person in every family who actually realizes that lights have been left on--in the garage, in the basement, in the pantry, the bathroom, the closet. Every morning, evening, afternoon, I walk around the house and methodically turn off lights. Sometimes I turn the pantry light off five hundred times in one day. I'm the only person here who seems to find this important.
This morning, after walking back into my bedroom to turn off the light in my husband's closet and the light on my husband's side of the bathroom, I went downstairs and turned on the Christmas tree lights. I didn't feel wildly Christmassy this year. I didn't feel anti-Christmasy, and I've certainly enjoyed all my traditional Christmas stuff (knitting gifts, eating Rae's cookies, and especially spending an entire day at Diane's gal-pal brunch, where the question "white or red?" is cheerfully asked at 10 am), but I've got a lot going on this year and Christmas kind of crept up on me. We usually put our tree up on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend; this year, we put it up December 6th. (The people we buy the tree from every year were a little concerned, wondering where we were. Yes, we live in a small town. Also, in addition to the tree, we buy 2 huge wreaths (for the barn doors) and 17 small ones (for the dining room and kitchen windows), so we're kind of memorable.)
To my surprise, the tree made all the difference. I wasn't longing for it until it was already up and decorated--until, every dark morning, I could fill the living room with all those little lights. And then I loved it. I loved the tree, I loved the light, I loved anticipating Christmas
Can you see where I'm going with this? It's practically a parable. It's an answer, at least a start, to yesterday's question (WTF?). Christmas. Fill the world with light. Fight the dark. Turn on the lights.
Just please, not in the pantry.
(If I could find one functioning camera in the entire house, I would take a photo of our Christmas tree and insert it here. But I can't. So pretend.)
The winter of 2008, I wasn't feeling the holiday spirit. The girls were newborns, I'd just gone back to work, Christmas was just going to be one more thing to deal with. One crazy afternoon, I walked by Eastern Market and saw the real trees for sale. I called up Hubby and asked about getting a real tree that year, for the first time since we'd been married (over 15 years). It really did make all the difference, and we've had real trees since. Yes, turn on the lights. Get a real tree. Take the small steps needed to keep going.
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