Christmas lights
My mother was in charge of the Christmas tree. My father was in charge of getting wood to keep the wood stove heating the house. He didn’t worry much about decorations. I only remember him bringing in a real tree once, when I was very little. My brothers helped get it into the house and balanced. It shed needles all over and the container of water it sat in was a hazard to our shiny wood floor. My mother waxed that hardwood floor every few months, on her hands and knees. Then she ran the buffer over it to make it shine. No way were we going to damage the finish by letting water set on it.
My brothers probably discussed the fire hazard aspects of the live tree; I remember knowing from an early age that it was dangerous to have hot lights on a live tree. This was when Christmas lights were incandescent, on heavier wires than you can get away with now. They were beautiful, but they got hot, very hot. The bulbs were as big around as my thumb, a pleasant drop shape, similar I suppose to the shape of a candle flame. I loved the bright colors. They stayed on for hours. Eventually the paint would peel off the bulbs, leading to color splotches and occasionally even a bare spot of bright white light.
Years later when climbing pine trees at the house we rented in Emblem, Wyoming, my children found a string of those old incandescents, wrapped around the trunk and branches so many years before that the tree had grown over parts of the wire.
There were smaller lights, still incandescent but tiny, only the thickness of a pencil or less, an inch long, but they were a newer type, not so common. We oohed and aahed at lights that twinkled, that turned on and off slowly at first, then quicker as they warmed up. These lights quickly advanced to ones that twinkled in rhythm. There was one light in the string that controlled the twinkling, called a blinker light. You knew when the blinker light gave out, because they stopped twinkling. If one of the other lights went out, they stopped lighting all together. My brothers spent hours going through lights, checking each bulb to see if it was the reason the entire string had stopped lighting. Even worse was when only half the string, every other bulb, went out. I think they enjoyed the detective aspects of it. Strings of lights were expensive enough to make replacement bulbs worth keeping, as backups.
My father and brothers strung lights along the porch windows a couple times. After my brothers moved out, we didn’t bother. We just put lights on the tree, and set it in front of my mother’s picture window. My dad had replaced the old 1920s double hung windows with a wide picture window and two smaller windows that opened for circulation. My mother hung a stained-glass ornament of a red cardinal in the center of the picture window, because so many birds rammed into the glass thinking it was clear. She felt terrible every time a robin lay limp in the grass after collision. Still, the view out that window felt good; I still love natural light and a view of the distance, whatever it is.
