Christmas Lights

I was alone on Christmas Eve, which was to be expected and not a big deal. I decided to sit for several hours in my apartment with the only illumination coming from the Christmas/New Year lights I had put up the previous week. To heighten the ambiance, I played Christmas music.

And I did a lot of thinking.

I tried to steer my thoughts clear of the fact that I was alone, and it wasn’t a problem. That will be a lot harder in a week when it is New Year’s Eve and being alone will be tougher to deal with. But for Christmas Eve, I focused on the lights. I just watched all the lights shining, blinking and cycling through their colors, and let them take me away, far away in time. And it was good.

The lights on my small tree progressed through several programmed phases, and my favorites were the slow alternations between red, green and yellow. But the flashing and sparkling were enjoyable too.

What really piqued my imagination were the multicolored lights I had put up along the top of my front wall and the string of blue lights along the top of a storage unit on the adjacent wall. It was the way the colors and shadows played off the ceiling and walls that made them special.

The front-wall string cast undulating spotlights of red, green and blue against the ceiling from one side wall to the other and threw shafts of color down upon the front wall. Meanwhile, the blue lights produced eerie, yet comforting shadows upon the ceiling and even the opposite wall. All together, they produced a show that, for a time, brought me back to my childhood.

Those Young Days

Christmas lights were among my greatest joys as a child. More than just being symbols of the magic of Christmas, they were magic themselves. Decorating our family Christmas tree was special, and it always started with the lights. Our lights had to be multicolored, and in those days we always had the strings with the large bulbs that have not been in style for decades.

What was even more impressive than our family tree, however, were all the different arrangements of lights outside, all over the town, all over the region – all of the world, for all I knew. Many families put lights on the outside of their houses, or on trees or bushes in the yard.

One of my strongest childhood memories of Christmas is driving to visit relatives in Taunton, the town where I was born, which was between 30 and 60 minutes away, depending on the weather. Along the way there were many houses lit up beautifully, and the city streets were always decorated with magical colored lights.

Some houses even had replicas of Santa, reindeer and sleighs in the front yards, lifelike caricatures with back and front lighting or steel frames turned into realistic images through the magic of colored lights. In those days, it was rare to see the boring, septic arrangements of white lights that you see today in so many American suburbs. It was all about color, and it was the color that really made the magic.

There were two places in particular that were extra special for this young boy: La Salette Shrine in Attleboro, and Taunton Green, a small park in the center of that city. Both were, and I assume still are, famous all over New England for their displays of Christmas lights. We would ride past La Salette sometimes on our way to Taunton, and a few times we even made it a destination where we would get out and walk around to get an “up close and personal” look at the lights and figurines.

Taunton Green was unique for its large traffic circle that ran all around the park and its two “lunch wagons,” small diners set in what looked like old train cars. Usually, we would take a couple of slow laps around the Green to take in all the lights before moving on to our relatives’ house. In those days, the center of that small city was virtually unchanged from times before the Second World War, and you could imagine old-style cars, right out of a 1930s movie, motoring around the snowy circle years before to the same kind of holiday display. The Green has been renovated and changed quite a bit since my childhood, but I’m sure it’s still a beautiful sight around Christmas.

There were other things that helped a kid feel the magic of Christmas: cold weather and a blanket of white snow, traditional holiday songs, the smell of pies and other special dishes baking and cooling. But there was nothing quite as memorable as those wonderful colored lights.

The Years Since

At times throughout my adult life, I attempted to recapture that magic, but it has never been quite the same, and I struggle to really recall any “magic” Christmases since my childhood. I suppose there were some nice ones when my girls were little, but there is no indelible memory.

As I was working on this post, I took some time to look through my collection of photos to try and find some memories of Christmases past. I found almost nothing. I did find a couple of photos that reminded me that I did put up a Christmas tree most years when I lived in Parker, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. I had a large window that faced the street, and the tree went in front of that window so that it could be seen from outside. But I did nothing else.

Sadly, I couldn’t find any evidence that I ever decorated my forest home in Bailey, Colorado, for Christmas, nor do I remember doing so. I don’t think I even put up a Christmas tree there. I lived alone and never expected to have anyone over for Christmas, plus I had an active little cat who probably would have pulled the whole thing down.

The Past Decade

Here in Ukraine, Christmas is not so important. It’s New Year that takes on all the focus here in much the same way that Christmas does in the U.S. Whether I decorate or not has always depended on my mood: whether I feel celebratory or just feel alone and depressed. Some years, like the end of 2015, there seemed to be no point in decorating, so I didn’t.

Some other years, like last year, I put up the lights and other decorations in an attempt to raise my mood, even though I knew it was likely I would spend New Year’s Eve alone. This year, in a new apartment, I’ve decided to decorate like I haven’t done in years. I guess part of that was due to throwing a holiday party the night before Christmas Eve.

The decorations will stay up until at least a little past New Year. I don’t know what will happen on the evening of December 31; New Year’s Eve presents an entirely different feeling here than Christmas Eve. And I know that I run the highly probable risk of just sitting here alone again, looking at the lights and getting drowned in a tide of melancholy. But I hope for better. I will try.

But Christmas Eve this year was notable because I discovered that the lights still mean something to me. They may not hold the same magic as they did all those many years ago, but they still have something for me, something to tell me, something to raise my spirits.

It’s funny how you can go for so long in your adult life not thinking about the magic of childhood, only to find a new appreciation of it in later years. If only we could keep that childlike wonder all our lives.

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It's Not Seventh Heaven

Sometimes specific situations seem like a microcosm of your entire life.

Between July and October, our company moved to a new building. There are more than a thousand people crammed into eight floors of mostly open space, and more are coming. Some like it, many don’t. For me, there are some definite pros and just a few cons. But this week I realized a big con.

I was among the first to move at the beginning of August. I have my own room, which functions as my office and my classroom. Each of the other teachers have similar office/classrooms, each of us on a different floor. Being on the seventh floor, I am the furthest removed from the others and, as I see now, the most isolated.

Having my own office is great, mostly. I can work without interruption, mostly. The noise in the hallways or from adjacent meeting rooms can make it difficult to concentrate sometimes, but that’s not a serious problem, mostly. And I have a private place to relax, have my morning coffee, or eat lunch in peace, which is a luxury afforded to very few in the building. For that, I am very fortunate.

And until recently, my room was a place where friends could stop by to talk for a while. Enjoying the company of good people who I know and like, for a half hour or more, has always been one of the highlights of my day. And even when you don't sit and talk, it's always nice to see a special face when walking to or from the rest room, etc. and stop to say hello and chat for just a few minutes. There were always at least a few such people on my floor, which made visiting easy.

But not any longer.

People are constantly moved from one floor to another as project teams jockey for space and try to get their people as close to each other as possible. This week, the last of my friends on the seventh floor was relocated far below. Now there is no one left.

There are a few familiar faces on the seventh floor, but very few and none who I know well. They are barely acquaintences. The vast majority are complete strangers. At the coffee point and elsewhere, all I see most of the time are blank, generic faces.

Each floor in our building seems to exist in isolation from the others. People tend to meet up with those on their own floors, only venturing further for their closest friends. If you aren’t on the same floor or aren’t particularly close, you just don’t bother.

My teaching colleagues are on lower floors, and I almost never see them. Everyone is “too busy” to make time to maintain the working relationships we had when we shared a room. Make no mistake: having a private, individual workspace is far better, but there is something wrong with a “team” that never makes time to meet. We have pretty much become strangers to one another. It’s not a team at all.

One person, whom I consider my best friend in the company, used to come up for lunch or coffee at least several times a week. I enjoyed those visits immensely. But nothing good lasts, and her project requirements have cut those meetings down to maybe once in two weeks. It’s not her fault; some projects can be pretty demanding. I was spoiled for a time, but that’s life.

So when my last friend on the seventh floor moved away early this week, it was the end of easy socializing for me. I realized today that I am in isolation on the seventh floor. I have a few hours of classes with students who are nice people, mostly, but not “friends.” And beyond that, I work alone, eat lunch alone, walk the floor alone – spend my work time alone. 

I am in exile.

And at this holiday time of year, which behind the colorful trees, decorations, music and merriment, always carries a dark reminder just below the surface that I exist here alone, my day on the seventh floor is a real reflection of my life.

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