The annual appearance of holiday lights in Wheeler Park is one of those seasonal manifestations of civic effectiveness that, like snow plowing and maintaining the water and sewer lines, are easy to take for granted. But I want to take a public stand here and state that it’s gotten better over the years, the chains of lights climbing high enough into tree canopies that I marvel at the physical and technological dexterity of those who install them.
And in part some of the lights are fascinating to me for an entirely different reason, which I’ll get to later.
For me these sorts of cheery lights began to be closely correlated with magic from an awfully early age. My parents hewed to an old German way of celebrating, which held that the Christmas tree and all its ornamentation should be introduced to children only as a fait accompli, which meant that my dad bought the tree at almost the last possible moment, somehow snuck it into the den when we children were asleep or otherwise distracted, and then decorated it.
This strategy was very successful at leading to considerable wonderment, as sometime late on Christmas Eve my parents would throw open the door to the den so that the three of us could marvel at how a tree bedecked with white lights, and underlain with wrapped packages, had suddenly materialized in this otherwise run-of-the-mill space. Fortunately for us, Germanic tradition also dictated that we got to open those presents that evening, rather than having to wait through an interminable night like our non-German friends.
Of course, it wasn’t as if the entire Christmas season appeared in that magical way. We’d been prepped for a long time in the usual ways, by hearing the piped-in carols in the mall, by eagerly talking about toys we’d like to have, by witnessing our mom engaged in the annual labor of baking cookies whose likes we experienced only in the depths of winter. They had funny German names like Spritz and Speculatius and Pfeffernüsse, though those classic recipes were soon complemented by more American varieties like chocolate-dipped shortbread bars and multicolored pinwheels.
And the lights. Early in their marriage my parents had acquired a window-display Christmas tree, this consisting of a panel about three feet high with a mock deep-green tree, but with genuine small lights sketching out the tree’s profile. I thought of it as deeply elegant somehow, and always looked forward to the evening after my dad had placed it in a front window and we then got to plug it in.
I’m sure I acquired this particular taste from him, as he very much held a recent immigrant’s perception that the ways Americans did things were often too garish, too loud, too bright. Christmastime was when this sense of being a bit outside mainstream society felt the strongest, for on Christmas Day we’d take the long drive down to the south side of Chicago, where his sister lived. She’d married a German immigrant who was a recent arrival, and their family celebrated the holiday in part by decorating the tree not with electric lights, but with actual flaming candles. I found it astonishing that anyone would so adhere to tradition that they’d risk burning their house down, but that never did happen.
This then is the backdrop that I bring to the holiday season today, a mixed-up mashup sense that Christmas is both a holy night, indeed, that stands as the peak of a period of spiritual reflection and family togetherness; and a ridiculous season of consumerism and terrible sweaters and worse canned music that epitomizes much of what is worst about our often-tacky society. Those things are both true at the same time, and a fair bit of the fascination of the season stems from that very fact.
It’s something that is amply on display at Wheeler Park. As it happens I usually have my annual checkup with the eye doctor in December, but I joke that I won’t consider my test complete until I’ve been by the park some evening. That’s because in addition to the ample white-bedecked trees the crew always leaves at least one tree glittering with deep-blue lights.
Due to the way in which blue light scatters, I gather, I can’t ever really focus on that one; the more I try to squint and sharpen my sight, the more the clear reality of the blue lights stays ever out of reach, fuzzed out unattainable. That’s how Christmas is, I guess: deep enough, but always giving off hints that it is in fact deeper and more meaningful than we can ever wrap our heads around.
