The Lombardi Factor (Short Story) {Part V}
December 7, 2012
A Not So Tropical Christmas
December 21, 2012
This essay was published in yesterday’s Silverton Standard newspaper. Brought back lots of great Christmas memories for me when I wrote the first draft last week. Thank God I’m not having to put X-mas lights up right now. We’re getting totally dumped on at the present moment (Hallelujah!!). Right now it’s snowing so hard that everything a person shovels in the morning is covered back up within an hour. A classic example of our weather patterns being totally different from the front range. Denver is only expecting a light dusting off this storm.
Anyway, its Christmas and these sorts of things are supposed to happen at this time of year. So are lots of holiday lights!!
Word Count: 812
Ways To Increase
Your Electric Bill
Who doesn’t like to bundle up in so many layers of warm clothing they look like a bad imitation of the Michelin Man, go out into Silverton’s bitterly cold December temperatures, and gaze glowingly at the outdoor Christmas Light Displays? Maybe some fanatical atheists or Ebenezer Scrooge types, but other than stick-in-the-mud pessimists like that, nobody that I know of. What a lot of people don’t realize is that these gaudy spectacles of illumination here in Silverton involved a lot of advanced planning, set-up, and very cold hands.
Every year during my childhood my father used to assemble a light display in front of our house. Some years it was a grandiose extravaganza rivaling anything the folks at San Miguel Power Association could come up with or encourage, other years it was a little less ostentatious and therefore more understated in its appearance. As I grew older, my involvement with the assembly of these light displays became one of the highlights of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
My father first started setting up light displays because a good friend from across the street brought him cutout patterns of Santa, six reindeer, Rudolph, and their sleigh. In fact, there was so much excitement for this project that another friend joined in to help with the cutouts. Besides this guy being another enthusiastic participant in the process, he happened to be custodian at the county courthouse. Therefore having a ready-made spot to assemble plywood backing for the paper cutouts, glue them together, and paint the works. Santa’s new light display factory also had lots of room to build things and happened to be warm. Always an important consideration at this time of the year in Silverton.
Setting up this display along with its corresponding lights in front of the our house even led to the county commissioners buying their own set of the cutouts for the courthouse lawn. Each display’s extravagance varied with the enthusiasm level from one year to the next as Dad kept setting up a different light display every December.
My involvement played a larger and larger role as I got older. Evolving from that of an enthusiastic, but annoying 4-year old with an overactive imagination to that of a willing participant in the process. One year getting so passionate about creating and setting up the light display that over excitement got the better of me and my glasses fogged up big time. I’m sure my father figured he was indeed raising a child with an enlarged adrenal gland when this happened.
Some years we went all out and assembled light spectacles that would rival fountain displays at some hotels in Las Vegas. Since our house happened to be on Silverton’s main drag, numerous positive feedbacks came from various locals. Our biggest concern in situations such as this was commercial aircraft mistaking our property as a runway and trying to land.
Then my father and I would contemplate the possibility of going into the light display business. Subsequently one of us would then return to reality.
Other years because of lower energy levels we’d dial it back a bit. The display we assembled for Christmas of ’73 stands out precisely because it was just that. This was the year of the first big energy crisis in America. Dad still put the cutouts on the roof of the front porch, but only illuminated it with a single light bulb brightening the entire display and its corresponding sign. He ended up getting a lot of great comments after setting up that one just because of its understated effectiveness.
Recently I helped set up a single illuminated snowflake in front of the house whose people I work for. The process was fairly simple and straightforward partially because I didn’t get cold. I largely caulk that up to the fact that we currently have very little snow and are experiencing unseasonably warm weather. In fact, the only somewhat complex part of the whole process was setting up the ladder.
Nonetheless a whole set of childhood memories came flooding back. Some bad of course like cold digits, and short days. Not being able to turn on the lights without routing the cords over that snow bank in front of the house, across the roof, and down through the basement also comes to mind.
So why did we keep setting up the Christmas lights year in and year out? All these years later I’m convinced my dad did it because it was a nice way to brighten up the long, cold nights at this time of the year in Silverton.
I look forward to the day when I can set-up Christmas lights in front of my own house. Hopefully the end result won’t look more anemic than I feared it would when first designing the display.
