Friday, December 27, 2002

Holiday Lights

Each year in the short, dark days of late December, I indulge in a secular pilgrimage to Winding Brook. The residents of this Mishawaka subdivision compete annually to out-do their neighbours with holiday decorations, spelling out festive cheer in twinkling lights. On my first trip, I resisted the allure of the seasonal glitz and glitter. It jarred my energy-wise sensibility to see so many watts frittered away for the sake of making a plastic reindeer glow. But the illuminations have become a popular holiday treat for many local families, who drive through the subdivision with parking lights only, and the organisers collect donations for worthy charities. I’ve come to admire the event as a postmodern American folk art. Where else can one see a three-quarters of life-size stuffed Santa posing in a real golf cart on a suburban lawn, or a garage door used as a projection screen for a still of carol singers?

Part of the pleasure of the viewing, for me, is making up stories about the homeowners who put the decorations together each year. Some of the yards are austerely didactic: “He is the Reason for the Season,” their signs proclaim - all in capital letters - and such yards feature no elves, but angels. Other yards are unabashedly syncretic: Frosty the Snowman kneels at a fibreglass manger, while shepherds watch their flocks by night under Old Glory picked out in fairy lights. Surely these different styles bespeak the homeowners’ various temperaments and ambitions? Does the scene of arab princes bringing tributes to a resolutely Caucasian Holy Family express the residents’ hopes for the Middle East? And what should we make of the stars and stripes displacing the star of wonder above the creche? I imagine, too, tales of friendly rivalries between neighbours as they assemble their displays; the subtle pressures on the only house on the street that doesn’t decorate; the triumphs and disasters of the family construction projects.

It’s also fun to spot trends in outdoor holiday decorations. A couple of years ago, icicle lights appeared on the eaves of a few houses, and now they are everywhere: a faux reminder of how winters used to be before global warming. This year’s novelty “must-have” for the yard is illuminated inflatables. I’ve seen these figures - usually Santas and Snow men - dotted all over town this year for the first time. Rotund and full of air, they glow and wave gently, bobbing against their tethers. And, if their fan mechanism malfunctions, they crumple, leaving a flaccid nylon shell on the driveway. While these inflatables strike me as wonderfully apt mascots to close this year in national politics, I leave the task of making local applications and analogies to the listener.

Instead, I’ll turn to a more obscure source of seasonal analogies: Janus, the Roman God for whom January is named. Janus is the deity of thresholds, doorways and beginnings. In statues, he has two faces - one looking into the future, the other looks back on the past. The dreary days between Christmas and New Year offer an opportunity to think over the past year before framing resolutions for the next. We have a chance to pause and take stock.

We’re taught that there’s a great American tradition of new beginnings, of self re-invention, unconstrained by the past. In the New World, the past need not define who we will become. But, this optimistic attitude to history is a double-edged trait. As Trent Lott recently learned to his surprise, there are limits to this process of wilfully reinventing one’s past. Though Frosty the Snowman is made new each year, he always stays in character: he’ll always be Frosty. Thus Janus reminds us that what we commit ourselves to do today becomes part of who we are forever.

Toasting the twinkling lights of Winding Brook, for Michiana Chronicles, this is Louise Collins.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on December 27, 2002
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