MY IDEA OF CHRISTMAS CLASS

DECEMBER 9, 2024 – When I was a kid, outdoor Christmas lighting was a crude precursor of its infinite modern refinements and variations. The standard issue lighting back in the day consisted of strings of large slightly oblong bulbs (featuring the primary colors plus green) that ran usually along the gutters, occasionally along the gabled ends of a house, and in the case of people with a year-round “Christmas tree” planted in the yard, around the tree from top to bottom.

Some people thought it would be cool to be different by hanging up bulbs all the same color. I didn’t mind all green or all red, since they were the Christmas colors, but all blue? Those gave me the creeps; way too . . . cold . . . I thought.

Yet, who was I to criticize people with (cold) mono-chromatic tastes? We never had any Christmas lights gracing the outside of our house. I asked my mother about it one year and she said, “Talk to your dad.” I did, of course, and he poured ice water on the idea before I could get to the end of my sentence.

“Way too much work,” he said. Not that Dad was lazy. Far from it, but he simply wasn’t enamored of the idea of having to spend a fortune at Joe’s Western Auto Hardware Store in downtown Anoka, which would’ve been the most likely place of procurement. Then there would be the matter of setting up the ladder, installing hooks, draping the light strings on the hooks, connecting an extension cord to the lights and plugging the extension cord into . . . now there was the main hitch, as Dad explained. Our house had no exterior outlets. The extension cord would have to be fed through a door or window opening in the garage, and I knew full well that that was not about to happen. Dad ran a tight ship . . . and tightly closed one, especially in winter.

I knew there was no point in persisting. When Dad threw cold water on an idea, it froze pretty much on contact.

But I wasn’t out of ideas. As I revealed in my 8/26/24 post (“LANDSCAPING: THE GREAT ESCAPE”), I was a royal fan of Spencer Gifts, and thanks to my modest purchases from time to time, the catalogs kept arriving in the mail. Early one November as I pored through the latest edition, I found “stained glass” that came in a convenient roll. You simply cut it to size, peeled the paper backing off the sticky side and applied the faux “stained glass” to whatever window you wanted to dress up. The small colored sections, separated by heavy black lines, were green, blue, red, and yellow—the same colors you saw on most multi-colored outdoor Christmas lighting. In addition to the easy-to-apply feature, I found the price to be well within my budget: two weeks of allowance would be enough to purchase a roll of “stained glass.” Moreover, according to the catalog illustration, the Cathedral look was entirely convincing—at least to a nine-year-old.

I knew exactly where the “stained glass” would go. The recessed front entry of our family’s Colonial-style home was standard issue: a door with a Palladian window and the doorway trimmed on each side by a set of narrow windows running halfway up the doorframe. I imagined how impressive the stained glass look would be at night—from the street—as passers-by caught a glimpse of the inside light setting the multi-colored stained glass all aglow. I thought it people would see it as evidence that we’d gone “classy rich.”

What I had in mind was an unusual and attractive alternative to Christmas lights strung up along the second story over-hang of our house and along the railing on the sundeck above the attached garage.

In reality, however, the Spencer Gift brand of “stained glass” was a royal bust, despite my best efforts at application. It was barely noticeable from the street, even when I turned the outside light above the doorway off and turned the inside hallway light behind the “stained glass” on.

What could be said of my idea was that it “stuck” rather well over the succeeding decades. Eventually Dad went to the effort of removing it, but the task wasn’t easy. The adhesive was more tenacious than Gorilla Glue.

In retrospect, my parents deserve a lot of credit. Not only did Mother not laugh at my “stained glass” idea, but she helped me apply it. And while Dad was a Grinch about outdoor lighting, he was game enough to accommodate my fantasy of installing Cathedral glass beside the doorway of his dream house. The translucent curtains that Mother later installed over the windows were my parents’ way of preserving a measure of decorum without hurting my feelings altogether.

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson

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