From late October onwards, I drive home from work in an oppressive darkness. I don’t mean in a, black cloud hanging over me/”‘I need those reports on my desk by eight am dammit, John” sort of way – but literally, as in the sun has gone down by 5pm and it’s already night.
As we move into December (and this year it seems to have been while we were still bumbling through November) people start to put their lights up – outside lights, along walls or along gutters, sometimes around trees or hedges. We don’t ever put them up ourselves (see also, ‘bah humbug’) but I have to admit, just as other people’s washing-up is always more interesting than your own, I like to see them.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that outside lights were the exception rather than the rule. Coming back up from Cornwall one Christmas night some years ago, all was darkness as we ventured through Launceston– until suddenly out of nowhere, in the middle of an otherwise darkened back street, there blazed just one single house, not so much decorated as smothered by glorious and gaudy lights of all manner of sizes and combinations. Seeing that light suddenly appear in the dark may have given us just a sense (once we’d got over the shock and established we weren’t blind) of what it was that got those Magi all fired up.
Risk to eyesight and good taste aside though, as December progress I love to (If you’ll forgive me sounding a bit Vera Lynn-y) to see the lights come on again, providing an ever-increasing series of landmarks along the route – a bright and comforting sign that it’s nearly Christmas and that I’m nearly home.
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 