I have loved Christmas lights from the time I was a small boy. Whether they were on my family’s Christmas tree at home, or adorning various houses on the drive home from my grandparents’ house, it was always a thrill to see Christmas lights. Sometimes my Dad would take the long way home just so we could see more Christmas lights.
Back in the late fifties we always had real a Christmas tree with those big, colorful, tear-shaped lights, the same kind you see on Ralphie’s Christmas tree in A Christmas Story. Then sometime in the 1960s Mom got tired of cleaning up pine needles and we got an artificial tree. For a while we used the old lights, but by the 1970s we had changed to the smaller, brighter lights shaped like tiny eyedroppers.
And the artificial trees were different in another crucial respect: the branches didn’t go all the way to the ground. (I guess that was to make room for more presents…?) That key difference made it possible to do something my brothers and I had never done before: we could lay under the tree and look up at the lights through the branches…at least until the presents crowded us out. I always thought it was especially beautiful, seeing the lights that way. Even as an adult from time to time I have laid down with my head under the tree to see the lights (when no one was looking).
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