The other day, I shared on Facebook the four most popular posts from December. Two of them were about Christmas.
A friend from way back commented that I’d written a lot about Christmas but not about the lights.
The Lights.
In short (because I’m not sure that a longer piece would do it any more justice), we always had the ugliest lights in the neighborhood.
The lights are retro now—the big, colored bulbs that, back in the day, got wicked hot. I saw quite a few houses with that type of light on them this year, though I suspect they are less of a fire hazard now than they were then.
I think—and honestly, my memory is fuzzy on this at this point—that the small lights were just coming out and were popular and were much more aesthetically pleasing and much less likely to burn the house down.
But my dad wouldn’t buy new lights as long as we had lights that worked perfectly fine, so the old lights went up year after year.
(And at this point, I see the value in this, and in many ways, I do the same…though I also have the benefit of Craigslist and the Facebook Marketplace and Freecycle for things I don’t want but still work.)
If I had a photo, I’d share it, but alas, I do not.
Fortunately, we didn’t have a ton of lights, so it didn’t scream “Griswold!”
Ah, the “good old days.” Not enough money in the world to revisit them, except maybe as an observer…