House of a Million Lights

I can tell you that it’s on the way to the dentist’s office across town, but I don’t think I could ever name for you the street or the house number.  It was a pretty dilapidated old thing—much like the tenants, I imagine—perched on a generous lot that took up most of a city block.  On a good day, it was an eyesore.  The squat off-white shack managed to stand out, even amidst the used-up cans of rust that were once cars and the rickety swing set.  It came right after a particularly hilly patch in the road on the ride to the dentist, so I was usually too busy keeping my head between my knees to bother looking at it.  Unless it was December, of course.

It was a whole other world around Christmas time.  Some faceless man, perhaps one of Santa’s own elves, came and gave the entire lot a healthy coating of incandescence.  Our family made a tradition of driving around town sometime in the weeks leading up to Christmas to survey the handiwork of our town’s residents.  Since we could not be reasonably expected at that age to know right from left, our parents directed our gazes by calling out the side of the vehicle the next lit-up house would be appearing on—Mommy’s (the driver’s side) or Daddy’s.  Some houses were admittedly boring with little but icicle or string lights, and the ones with flamboyant collections of inflatables were always fun.  But it was the House of Million Lights we waited for.  Neither my sisters nor I cared that it was a full 20 minutes out of the way of our usual light-viewing tour; we begged for it, and our parents always wound up folding.  The car would creep to an almost-standstill to allow us time to press our noses to the Daddy’s-side windows and ogle the dazzling display.  It was all there—the nativity diorama lit with floodlights, Santa’s sleigh recreated in LEDs, all manner of blinking, flashing, strobing icons of the Yuletide season.  The house was decked out, too.  The peeling paint and filthy gutters vanished under rainbow string lights.

In December, the inhabitants were not the “trailer trash” my mother made them out to be.  They were royalty.  It was tradition, and no one dared defy it.  Every year, like clockwork, you could expect the wise men to appear over the hill in such a timely manner you could set your watch by it.  The lights were no different.  They appeared just after Thanksgiving, without fail, every single year.  And nothing was exempt from the Christmas charm.  What once was lead became gold; the grubby shepherds were upgraded to bearers of the Word.  No one mocked their plain clothes or unkempt hair when they came dashing down from the fields with such wondrous good news on their tongues.  Just the same, my mother bit her tongue when we inched past the House of a Million Lights and let the shepherds have their moment.
         Beyond the house-hopping drive, we also made a pilgrimage to Carthage to drive through the “Way of Salvation” light display.  It was the one time of year my parents didn’t bother making us buckle our seatbelts or stay in our seats, since the max speed through the guided labyrinth was a whopping five miles an hour.  It began with nonsense fixtures—animated ducks fishing in frozen-over ponds and grinning dinosaurs munching neon-green leaves from rope-light trees.  It gave us time to tune our radio to the channel they hosted, the one that tells the lit-up bible stories in the right order, but never in sync with our position in the unending line of cars.  We usually lost interest by the time we got to Elijah and the chariot of fire.  We’d stop keeling this way and that, craning to see the next display, and instead relish the novel feeling of lounging in the car in pajamas, no shoes, no seatbelts.  When we arrived at Jesus’ birth, we’d wait and watch the plastic barn animals’ noses and squeal when the cow or sheep released an automated puff of steam.  On the way out, we’d mock the host church’s Vietnamese name and, if we hadn’t pissed off Mom and Dad too badly, proceed to Braum’s to stuff ourselves with Black Forest Sundaes, too proud to admit we’d started feeling sick three bites ago.

I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I’ve been to Way of Salvation, but I imagine I’d probably need both hands to count.  It might have been one of the first Christmas traditions to vanish, but it won’t be the last.  Somehow I’ve still managed to maintain my streak for waking up Christmas morning in my father’s house through college and the first two years of marriage, but I don’t think I’ll manage it this year.  A number of factors point to not only a different Christmas experience, but a different way of visiting in general: the lack of a bed in my former room, the divorce paperwork that has finally been filed, the impending sale of my childhood home of nearly fifteen years.  This year, there will be no joint effort by my parents to hide our candy-laden stockings before we wake (which might be a good thing—the hiding spots got harder every year, and last year it took a full ten minutes to find mine).  I doubt my father will even take the time to decorate the yard of the house he already feels like he’s on the way out of.  Frosty, Mary, Joseph, and all the rest will stay in their boxes this year.  This time next year, they might just find themselves on the shelf at Goodwill.

Things look different when you’re not little anymore.  Lately I find myself homesick, in a way more temporal than spatial.  It’s like visiting your elementary school years later, breathing in the nostalgia, then going immediately from fondly content to pissed when your ass gets stuck in one of those tiny chairs.  But you can’t be mad at that chair, it’s a part of your childhood!  So who are you mad at?  Not yourself, either.  Things aren’t worse, just different.

Two years ago was my first Christmas as a married woman.  We lived in a studio apartment, and the extent of our Christmas decorating was a one-foot white tree on our kitchen table.  Afterwards, we scoured the clearance section and found a proper tree for a steal.  When I took it out of the box for the first time, nearly a year after its purchase, I was underwhelmed, to say the least.  The measly thing stood a scant five feet tall, was thin as a rail, and got swallowed by the discount tree skirt.  I spent a solid hour carefully balancing the larger ornaments, which attempted to pull over the wussy tree more than once, then stepped back and wallowed in the dissatisfaction of the Charlie Brown-esque twig in the corner.  Then I did something out of character for me—I went out and purchased a new tree.  At full price.  Before the post-holiday clearance.

I couldn’t bring myself to downgrade from the seven-foot, burgundy-and-gold monster of a tree I’d known all my life.  My father wasn’t especially proud of my deviance from my usual frugality, but I wasn’t pleased with any tree shorter than me.  It was a kind of juxtaposition of traditions.  I had been raised to scrimp and save, to donate what I didn’t need or use, to never keep what I wouldn’t miss.  But I was also raised to anticipate the yearly shuffle of furniture in the living room to make space for my mother’s towering display of peacock-like Christmas vanity.  In the end, that vanity won—but what I have is not a carefully coordinated, professional-grade tree.  The seven-and-a-half foot, pre-lit tree I settled on (actually a small step up) bears instead a motley hodge-podge of ornaments documenting my husband’s childhood.

His traditions were much different than mine.  His mother’s tree had no theme, unless you consider it a once-a-year scrapbook of her sons’ school Christmas parties.  The ornaments I crafted in elementary school were always the last onto my mother’s tree, and they always got tucked away in the branches that faced the wall.  Our tree now is the height and thickness of the tree I had growing up, but lovingly and clashingly decorated like his.

I have things now that I never had before, and those things don’t bother me.  I have a cat that curls up on the tree skirt and swats at the lowest-hanging ornaments.  I have a husband who takes the time to make things from scratch every now and again, who frowns on holiday staples that come straight out of a box or can (God, don’t get him started on my love for boxed stuffing).  Introducing these new elements to my holiday season does not bother me, but the removal of the old sometimes does.  I understand that some things naturally fade, but there are just a few things that have proved difficult to let go of.

Maybe four years ago now, at about sixteen or seventeen, I mentioned the House of a Million Lights to my mother—some passing suggestion that we hadn’t seen it in a while, and maybe we should go have a look that year.  I got an eyebrow raised at me.

“You mean the house on Maiden, just off Murphy?”

“Uh, sure.  You know, on the way to the dentist.”

The eyebrow creeped higher.  “You don’t remember the sign?”

“No…?”

“The guy had cancer, Heather.  The one that put up all the lights.  There was a sign last year—the family did it one more year in his memory, but it’s too much work without him.”

I found it on Google Maps.  No one remembered the address, so I plunked myself down in Street View halfway to the dentist’s office and moseyed toward it, one agonizing click of the “forward” arrow at a time.  669 North Maiden Lane.  It’s uglier than I remember, especially in daylight.  I guess the yard’s not littered with as much junk as I thought, and the tree looks lovely, at least on whatever day the street car went by.  The chipped paint is worse than ever, and it looks like they’ve surrendered some of the lot for some newer little bungalows.  Maybe the family, minus their Christmas-loving patriarch, couldn’t bear to stay, I wouldn’t know.  Maybe they, like me and my husband, have shirked tradition and started afresh elsewhere.

I’m coming to terms with the death of a man I never once met, a man without a name or a face—one of Santa’s own elves, I think.  I don’t think there’s a house in all of Springfield like it was.  Maybe not even in the whole world.