Oh Those Tacky Christmas Lights!

Christmas lights take me back to the innocence of my childhood, to a time when my parents would gather me and my five siblings and put us in the station wagon with winter coats over our pajamas and we would ride around the neighborhood and look at the Christmas lights displayed on other people's houses.

Did you do that too?


One of the houses on the Richmond Tacky Lights Christmas tour
Photo courtesy of Richmond.com

Those were the days when Christmas lights were larger than they are today -- no LEDs back then -- and they only came in blue, green, red, yellow and cream.  Pink and turquoise were nowhere to be found and I don't remember anyone ever having only white lights on their Christmas tree or on their house as is popular today.

 

It's a warm and cozy memory for me, made more dramatic because we would view the lights in the darkness of night and everything seemed magical from the safety of a car with your parents in the front seat.  Those were also the days when there were no seat belts so the babies would be lying in a carry-all and we would giggle and wiggle and slide around on the seats and press our faces to the cold glass of the car window and pick our favorite lights.

 

Today, my 23-year-old son absolutely adores Christmas lights!  There can never be enough Christmas lights for him and he especially loves a section of houses in Maryland that we pass on the way to his grandparents house where the neighbors are in competition with each other to see who can put up the most lights on the houses and in their yards.  I can't imagine what their electrical bill looks like.


Another house on the Richmond Tacky Lights Christmas tour
Photo Courtesy of Richmond.com

 

My son now lives in Richmond, VA and yesterday he tweeted about the Tacky Lights Christmas tour in Richmond, VA which of course is right up his alley.  I'm sure he will check out a few of the over-the-top displays which are part of a tradition started in Richmond in 1985 when local DJ Mad Dog Gottlieb booked a Winn bus and took a select group of Richmonders on a "tacky lights" tour of 10 to 12 houses.

Who knew that Richmond took such pride in its' creative abundance of Christmas lights?

Initially, houses needed a minimum of 10,000 lights.  Then it was decided that houses needed up to 20,000 and 30,000  Now, houses must have a minimum of 40,000 lights to be considered as part of the tour.  Can you imagine how long it takes for people to string this stuff up?

But what is tacky to one person is exciting and beautiful to another.

I can't help but think that there are lots of families out there this year creating their own memories by gathering their young children into their cars at night, riding around to ooh and ahh at the blinking, twinkling, multi-colored unbelievable houses full of Christmas Cheer!

Another house on the Richmond Tacky Lights Christmas tour
Photo Courtesy of Richmond.com

An Emotional Box

As I continue to slowly reorganize my freshly painted bedroom, it is amazing the things you find stored under your bed.

 

Last week I wrote about my long put-off decision to finally paint and reorganize my bedroom following my husband's death.  Now, as I pick and choose what I am bringing back into that room, I am dealing with some of the things that I pushed aside and choose not to think about.

 

In this instance, it is an old Estee Lauder box that once held cosmetics and perfume.  I loved the different colored berries pictured on the outside of the box and so I kept it and filled it with special things that I wanted to keep together in one place.

 

 

 

 

When my son was born, I put all the cards that people mailed to us in that box and then I continued to fill the box with birthday and holiday cards that he received as a child and various art projects that he did when he was in pre-school.

 

OMG, it is so precious!  When I opened the box, I just sat there and stared at it for a long time.

 

It's quite the emotional box; full of hopes, dreams, expectations, love and all the sweetness that I felt with the birth of my son and his early years as a toddler.  I went on a trip when I opened that box, a trip where I met myself and my husband some twenty-odd years ago.  We weren't young parents but we were a lot younger then and we had a new little baby boy and we were full of love, love, love and oblivious to the idea that it could ever, ever change.

 

I brought the box to my son, my "baby" who is now in his twenties, and showed him what I had found.  I took the cards out, one by one, opening them up and reading the kind messages and telling him about the friends and family that had sent these amazing cards when he was born and the other cards that came to him on Halloween, Valentine's Day and other birthdays.  He was fascinated that I had saved all these things and I was too.

 

In a way, I wished I hadn't saved all these sentimental momentos.  They were from another time, a time when there was three of us.  It's only been my son and I after my husband's death and sometimes it feels as though it's always been that way.  Or at least my mind tricks me into thinking that sometimes. 

 

But the cards are proof of a different family and different people.

 

I don't mean that in a bad way or even a sad way.  It was just different.

 

Finding the box led me and my son to talking and reminiscing about the people who sent the cherished cards and telling stories about them.  As we laughed and I answered his questions, I remembered things that I hadn't thought about in years and at the same time I felt the responsibility of being the only parent.  Since his father is no longer alive, I really wanted to remember everything I could to let him know what that time was like when he was an infant and toddler.

 

There are a lot of times as a single parent that you have to be both mother and father.  Discipline and financial decisions immediately come to mind as examples.  That isn't always a great role to fill and those are the times when you wish you had someone else to share the responsibility with.

But this time I was happy to talk to him for hours about the immense happiness that his birth brought to us, his mother and his father, and continues to bring to me.