When I was a child, growing up in southern California, the Season officially began when we spotted the first strings of Christmas lights on a house. They were big, brightly colored bulbs back then, none of the stylish tiny white twinkles, trailing icicles, and mysterious blues of today. I still remember how thrilling it was when someone in our Ford Galaxy shouted, "Christmas lights!" as we drove to M.V. meeting in Pomona on a Friday evening in late November.

All the way to the church (a drive of about half an hour) we would watch for lights, and each week brought more and more. We noted and discussed innovations: there was the Santa with sleigh and reindeer on a roof, the huge snowman made of lights, the words Merry Christmas blinking on and off. One year, on our return journey as we peaked the top of Kellogg Hill and headed down into the San Gabriel Valley, we saw a fabulous sight: a huge Christmas tree made of balls of light, strung upon the tower of the new May Company.

Then came the Sunday when my father got out the ladder to put up the lights at our house. My brother and I helped untangle the strings and vied to be the one who plugged them in each evening. And then the Christmas tree, my mother’s province. For my first twelve years it was green, and covered with multicolored lights and large gold and silver glass ornaments.

Then suddenly my mother got trendy. It was the 1960s, I guess. She bought a tree and had it flocked with a white substance meant to resemble snow. Then she carefully added pink and blue globes; instead of strings of lights, she placed beside our tree a rotating, four-color floodlight. Turn it on and it made a low humming sound while our white tree turned gold, then gradually became red, then blue, then green.

It was a little startling at first, but I soon came it find it both beautiful and traditional—until one year, when I was in college, the green tree returned, this time covered with tiny teddy bears and twinkling white lights.

So far, these memoirs represent a fairly typical mid-twentieth-century American Christmas, I suspect. But I can lay claim to a few unusual elements. First, my mother’s family was Australian, so there were some English touches, most notably the steamed pudding full of dimes, carefully disinfected in advance, which was the culmination every Christmas dinner of my youth. We chewed carefully, and counted to see who had the most.

And because we were Adventist, we went Ingathering. My family preferred singing to asking for money. In Pomona, we sat with a dozen other church members on benches night after night in the back of a large truck, which rolled slowly through the neighborhoods as we sang carol after carol, with flashlights for those who didn’t know the words. We were stiff and cold by the time we got back to the church, to drink hot chocolate while the loot was counted. Stranger, perhaps, are my memories of quartets singing about lowing cattle in the eerie glow of aqua swimming pools at apartment complexes in Rosemead and San Gabriel a few years later.

Not much here about the Incarnation; mostly my childhood memories, despite growing up in the church, are of Santa Claus, and Rudolph, and Frosty, and not much about Jesus, really. And yet, looking back, I now see that mostly Christmas was, and still is, about light.

At this darkest, coldest time, we, like so many of our human brothers and sisters living in the Northern Hemisphere, note the turning of the year, we acknowledge that we have been rolling down into a deep ditch—a ditch whose damp and dark remind us of the grave. It is death we fear, on these long December nights, when the sun seems to have forgotten us. So we light our candles and sing, affirming our faith that because of what happened on Christmas day, we begin to roll back out, up toward the light.

This is the meaning of the Star of Bethlehem. We are the people who sit in darkness, but the whole Bible affirms that our God is a God of light: a burning bush and a pillar of fire and tongues of flame. Jesus, the Light of the World. And so we hang our Christmas lights, because we know that when we find ourselves in the valley of the shadow of death, we may turn to him for light and life.

When my parents moved out of their home of almost forty years, to a little house nearer to me; in other words, when they moved to Calistoga to die, my father still insisted on putting up Christmas lights. He got out the ladder, climbed it with legs weakened by diabetic neuropathy, and strung those bulbs of glowing colors along the eaves to shine in the darkness.

And when my father died, sixteen days after my mother, I came home that Friday evening at dusk and put on a CD of the Brahms Requiem. "Requiem," they sang. "Requiem aeternam." Eternal rest grant them, O Lord. "Et Lux Perpetua." And let perpetual light shine upon them.

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