Colored-Lights People

It is time for the annual Christmas lights show across America, when we put candles in windows, outline our houses, spotlight our doors — and in general thumb our noses at the darkness.

There are specific houses and entire streets I look forward to every year. One dripping in white icicle bulbs that looks like a winter wonderland, another crowded with mismatched Santas, Rudolfs and snowmen.

We have always decorated with colored lights rather than white, with no particular agenda in mind, just a choice. But I remembered as I began to write this post that the late Michael Kelly had written a column about white lights vs. colored lights, and so I found it online and read it.

White lights, Kelly said, "make the statement that one is a refined sort who appreciates that less is more," and colored lights say that Christmas isn't Christmas "without an electric sled and reindeer on the lawn, an electric Santa on the roof, an electric Frosty by the front gate and an electric Very Special Person in a manger on the porch" (that last phrase refers to the pageant at his Unitarian church).

While we have no inflatable Santas on our lawn, we are most definitely colored-lights people, a little mismatched and scruffy, never the first to put up our display and often the last to take it down. White lights would be false advertising.