All Those Lights



Pyramid Hill's Holiday Lights
Hamilton, Ohio

Some people have Christmas traditions like going to see "The Nutcracker" every year, or ice skating outdoors, or visiting Santa at the mall. Our family tradition dates back to when my son was little and we lived in Florida. My grandmother always picked a December night and invited us to drive around to look at Christmas lights.

It was a somewhat strange tradition in Florida, since it was often balmy and there was never any snow while we listened to Johnny Mathis dream about white Christmases. But we enjoyed the tradition anyway. Eventually my son and I moved back to Ohio. My grandmother moved back a few years later and we continued the tradition, later including my new husband and daughter in the festivities. We started looking at not just lit-up houses, but Christmas light displays that we paid to drive through, too. My grandmother loved those.

We could count on her to make the same remarks every year as we drove through hundreds of thousands of lights on display. In fact, we could recite her lines before we even picked her up:

        "Oh! Look at all those lights! I wouldn't want to be the one who had to put up all those lights!"

        "Someone sure had a lot of work to do, putting up all those lights."

        "Where do you suppose they store all those lights?"

        "I'd hate to be the one who had to check all those lights if one of the bulbs burned out."

She'd repeat these lines several times as we drove around looking at light displays. We'd all ooh and ahh over our favorite decorations and listen to Christmas music as we toured neighborhoods for hours. It's become an annual tradition and we look forward to picking my grandmother up and hearing her say her lines year after year.

But last year she didn't say them. The dementia had made her more quiet than usual, and the work and sweat that went into creating these elaborate light displays didn't even enter her mind. She still enjoyed looking at them, but we were all disappointed somehow. Looking at lights just wasn't the same without her annual exclamations.

So last night we ventured out and didn't expect much, though we all hoped we'd hear her usual lines. We recited them to ourselves before we picked her up and headed out. There weren't many houses decorated on the way to Pyramid Hill's Holiday Lights. I guess it's a sign of the economic times, or it's just been too cold and snowy for people to put them up. But as soon as we turned into the drive for Pyramid Hill, we heard my grandmother draw in her breath and gasp with delight. "Look at all these lights! How long do you think it took someone to put all those up?"

And just like that, it was Christmas again.