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Not a White-Lights Person
By Michael Kelly
This column was published in the Washington Post on Dec. 12, 2001. The
Post reran it on April 5, 2003, opposite an editorial about Kelly's
death.
I am Catholic and my wife is Jewish, so in our house we celebrate both
Hanukah and Christmas, which our sons, Tom and Jack, regard as an
excellent thing. People sometimes ask me if it is hard to raise children
in respect and love for two great faiths that have a slight doctrinal
disagreement between them, and I say: Not if you give them presents
every day for eight days of Hanukah and for Christmas. The more Gods,
the merrier is Tom and Jack's strong belief.
Like other parents, we try not to let the materialism get out of hand,
and to keep the focus on the sacred. This year, on the first day of
Hanukah, we gave Tom, 5, a realistic, detachable, revolving red police
cruiser roof light, so that he may follow the ancient Jewish holy
practice of impersonating a state trooper. He received the gift with
appropriate reverence. We gave Jack, 2, some Silly Putty. He received
the gift in his hair, and now he is in a fine shape to play the role in
the Christmas pageant of the Wondering Child With a Bald Spot.
Actually, Jack has not been cast in a pageant. Tom has, though. He has a
walk-on in the pageant staged by our local Unitarian church. There was a
rehearsal the other Sunday after the service, which featured the
lighting of a menorah (during which apologies were offered to anyone who
might take offense at a lighting before sundown), followed by the
traditional singing of the great Christian hymn "Oh, Mitten Tree"
(during which the faithful paraded around a tree that was decked, in
fact, with mittens). A Unitarian pageant turns out to be different from
a Roman Catholic one. In Tom's pageant, Jesus Christ is celebrated as "a
very special person" and "a great rabbi" and an all-around asset to the
community. The Son-of-God debate, which has proved so regrettably
contentious over the years, is not mentioned.
No doubt this is all to the good. There is too much disputation around
Christmas anyway. One growing issue is the white vs. colored lights
debate. Like all matters of taste, this is also a matter of class. White
lights are high-class; colored lights are somewhat less so.
White lights make the statement that one is a refined sort who
appreciates that less is more and who celebrates Christmas (and life in
general) in such a fashion that one would not be absolutely mortified if
Martha Stewart dropped by unexpectedly for tea. Colored lights make the
statement that one is the sort of person who believes that Christmas is
not Christmas without an electric sled and reindeer on the lawn, an
electric Santa on the roof, an electric Frosty by the front gate and an
electric Very Special Person in a manger on the porch.
Most of the houses in my neighborhood are white-light houses, and I have
to admit they are lovely, but I was raised in a colored-light family,
and I am raising Tom and Jack to be colored-light men too. They do not
take a lot of convincing on this. Boys are naturally colored-lighters.
We got up the first three strings of our lights the weekend before last,
and another two last weekend, at which time we threw away the rotted
Halloween pumpkin. I might have gotten more lights up by now except that
the remaining three strings are not working. To fix them you have to go
through and find the burned-out bulb and replace it, and there are a lot
of bulbs in a string, and the whole enterprise is one of those things
that lead Daddy to point out that this is really the sort of job Mommy
does better, and Mommy claims that she doesn't know how to do it because
she wasn't raised in a colored-light family. This is a cop-out, and
unworthy of her.
Still, I am confident we will get all the lights up by New Year's, and
all down by Easter. In my family, it was considered poor form to leave
the lights up past Easter; it suggested shiftlessness. One elderly woman
in our neighborhood did leave her lights up, and also her tree, and her
electric Santa, all year around. But she was considered a special case
and no one held it against her. This may have been because everyone back
then was a colored-light person. Colored-lighters are more relaxed about
this sort of thing than white-lighters.
But that was judgmental, wasn't it? I should not be judgmental. I
learned that from the Unitarians. Colored-lighters aren't any better
than white-lighters; we are all special persons. Very.
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