Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412190102
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That afternoon, we kids had wondered what the man across the street had been doing. There was no doubt about it now, as in the murky twilight the bright green and red and blue lights glowed in an outline of the poor deluded man's porch.
In the competition for inclusion on our map at the top of this page, this array wouldn't have placed. It was just a single string of multicolored lights, as I recall.
At the time, 30 years ago, they seemed outrageously garish though. People in our part of the world just didn't make such ostentatious displays of Christmas "commercialism."
The majority in our neighborhood - and we assumed, the world - were Charlie Browns, complaining about the rampant materialism taking over the Christmas season. We worried that the "reason for the season" was being forgotten in a tinseled deluge of "things."
We didn't have any objections to presents, mind you. Or to buying additional ornaments for the tree each year. But we had our limits.
Dad insisted on a real - free - tree cut with his own hands from the top of some larger specimen growing on his parents' farm. Of the farm's 180 acres, there also was one secret plot where the rare "running cedar" grew along the ground, the perfect material for making the tastefully green wreath for the door and for covering the mantle top.
It was one thing to set up the tree so it was visible to the outside world through the picture window, but to have covered the house or shrubbery with lights would have been seen as tasteless and offensive.
My guess is that the kind of displays that we're running maps for today would have drawn angry protests from the neighbors and a proliferation of "for sale" signs.
As it was, there was a steady whisper on the block debating the appropriateness and the impact of the shocking strand on that lonely stoop.
I'd guess that the old neighborhood this year is no different from most neighborhoods around here. It seems that almost everyone has some sort of display. There are electric candles in the windows - orange or white; the outline of windows and doors and roofs; bushes glowing red, green, yellow and blue; even dog houses and satellite dishes trimmed with the glow of electric celebration.
Instead of objecting to the displays, neighbors are more likely to try to outdo them. You've got a three-foot Santa? I'll get a six-foot one. Your display is on the lawn? Mine will be on the roof. You're using 3,000 lights? I'll use 5,000.
Of course, some people still do object to the displays, and some folks have been asked by the neighbors to tone down or turn off their light shows. On the whole, though, they are a lot more accepted than they used to be.
I admit that I have given in to the temptation myself. Of course I kept it tasteful, restricting the display to a strand of simple, tiny, pure white lights around the front porch. I wonder if the fact that I didn't take them down from last year will hurt my chances in the best-dressed house contest this year?
OK, I won't be eligible for a contest - except maybe for laziest homeowner - and wouldn't enter one if I were, but I am more mellow about these displays than I used to be.
Do all the lights and Santas and reindeer - or even the creches - have much to do with the birth of a baby named Jesus 2,000 years ago? Of course not, but there's no sin in finding pleasure - and sometimes meaning - in them.
by CNB