By Esther C. Baird, First published in the Ipswich Local New 12/2/2022
Regular readers know we are early Christmas decorators. Out with the blah browns and dead leaves and in with the festive colors and sparkling lights. Speaking of light, my entire yuletide purpose, if distilled down to its essence, is to illuminate my tiny part of the North Shore at Christmas.
I’ve long said that we live in the wrong time zone. We’re perched on the bitter eastern edge, where the sun rises, makes a brief appearance, and then dashes west to spend most of our allotted hour elsewhere. What that means, if you’ve stayed with my annual time-zone rant, is that we need significantly more light.
I’ve dabbled in all the pre-lit holiday lighting: LED, battery, electric, solar, etc. If you’re curious, solar LED comes in dead last, emitting a faint, ghost-like glow that merely hints at the idea of light.
I mostly prefer the standard white electric twinkle lights, though we’ve done colors, and last year we experimented with lit “rain sticks.” They ended up decorating our dog pen rather than our house, if that says anything about how that went.
The dogs felt festive, at least.
Ultimately, in this vale of darkness we call home, the key ingredient to a well-lit Christmas residence is that tricky, tricky art form: the battery-operated window candle.
After many fits and starts, I sprung for a set that came with both a timer and suction cups to hold them in place from that constant candle nemesis: the giant dog tail.
My system was to place all the candles on the kitchen counter, and on the given Day O’ Decorating, as the sun set and the land grew dark, I clicked the timer on. And they flickered to life on the counter.
I said they flickered to life on the counter!
This year, three refused to flicker to life until my second attempt, when I manually turned them on. Finally, there was abundant light.
With arms full of candles, I went around the house and suctioned them to the windows. The dark corners were bathed in the glow of battery-operated fake flames of light.
Unfortunately, this included the next morning at 6:30 a.m., when four candles were still flickering their little plastic hearts out. I sighed and turned them off. It was never a perfect first run.
Or second.
Around 1 p.m., three candles blinked on. In broad daylight. It was a little showy, if you ask me. Obviously, I supported the vision of more light, just … 1 p.m. was generally one of the only assuredly safe times we could count on light from the actual sun.
That evening, some candles went on when they were supposed to, but many did not. Some, of course, had been glowing for hours. After an incident in which a candle was found, lit and flickering, in a bathtub, leaving us with more questions than answers, I sighed.
“I am NOT taking all the candles out of the windows and doing this again!” I announced, knowing full well that was exactly what I would be doing.
I gathered them back on my kitchen counter like the misfit toys they were. This time, I turned them all off and on a few times, confirming they all would respond to the remote, and then I clicked the timer button.
They all came on … except two.
Having learned my lesson, I pronounced them rogue and banished them to a side window where they could illuminate some rhododendrons and think about their timing choices.
And so our house is full of light that’s mostly on the right schedule — a small force to fight against the time zone that hurls us off the Eastern Seaboard into darkness these next few months.
But it’s a reminder as well. Because in our family, we celebrate the coming of the One who was called the light and life of all people, the light that darkness could not overcome.
Perhaps this year, as we try to gather together once again, despite a country and state that has had its fair share of darkness, we can at least agree that we need light — more light, brighter and lasting light!