Date: Fri 12-Dec-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: DOTTIE

Quick Words:

Christmas-lights

Full Text:

Outside Lights: Holiday Decor Or Disaster?

(with cuts)

(NOTE: THIS STORY HAS A SIDEBAR; key words: Christmas-lights-sidebar)

BY DOROTHY EVANS

For many Newtown homeowners, last weekend marked the beginning of their own

annual Outside Lighting Display season, coinciding with the Holiday House

Tour.

Several residents were seen Sunday afternoon out in their front yards, perched

atop ladders, struggling with extension cords and light strings dangling.

Most often, these Newtown residents found the annual hanging of their outside

lights a pleasurable solitary ritual or a cooperative joint effort, as it

seemed to be for Jim Ryan and his father, Tom Ryan, of The Boulevard.

The Ryans, encouraged from inside the house by Lisa Ryan, worked together to

decorate two upstairs window boxes with mini-lighted evergreens for little

Andrew and Connor Ryan, who were napping inside.

We heard about another man's experience, however, where it seemed that nothing

went right. Working by himself, one Wendover Road resident was observed trying

to drape his strings of bulbs in the bare branches of his Japanese maple tree

by flinging them upwards.

Though he walked around the base of the tree and pitched the strands skyward,

they failed to fall upon the branch ends and arrange themselves into

symmetrical arcs as planned. So in the end he just hurled the whole tangled

mess at the tree and retreated in digust to the house.

Perhaps after watching the second half of a football game from the comfort of

his couch, he returned later with a ladder and finished the job successfully.

Lighting The Darkness

Modest or magnificent, these front yard light displays bring much needed cheer

to darkest December. With barely nine hours of daylight left, we need them

just to make it through the long winter's night.

There are luminaria lining front walks, strings of mini-lights blinking around

doorways and garlands of bulbs circling the foundation plantings, glowing red,

orange, blue, yellow, green and purple.

Strobe lights flash and Santas beam.

A Nativity scene reminds us of what happened on Christmas Eve in Bethlehem

long ago.

And to think that people go to all this trouble of putting up their outside

lights every year -- not just for themselves and their families, but for

strangers, too.

Outside lights are a sort of modern day equivalent of lighting a candle in the

window to welcome wayfarers.