In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother’s form of punishment is unique: Find out what frightens each troublemaker the most, then subject that person to it. For instance, Winston Smith fears rodents so he’s thrown in a rat-filled room. If I were a character in 1984, Big Brother could punish me by shoving me into a tourist bus going 8 miles an hour through Ogleby, West Virginia’s Winter Festival of Lights. It’s the nation's largest light show, covering more than three hundred acres over a six mile drive. Traffic grinds to a near halt. Like the hours spent watching “Fear Factor,“ this is time you will remember on your death bed that will agonize you because you can’t take it back.
People have gazed at lights in the sky -- once called star gazing -- since Adam first put the moves on Eve. Driving through the “festival of lights” is sort of the same thing, except the main difference is that true star-gazing allows you to be still, sitting quietly in your back yard or at a camp site drinking beer, beholding the magnificence of the sky. At holiday lights festivals, you are behind the wheel, going slow, in the winter, feeling hot and confined. The one good thing about it being winter, though, is that the car windows are up. No one will hear your family screaming at each other, trapped on a holiday death march on wheels.
I don’t even put up lights at my house. I can’t think of a sillier, more illogical, let alone unnecessary chore than standing on a ladder in icy weather, stapling strings of twinkling lights up and down the side of the house. If city ordinances permitted me to set up a baccarat table and roulelette wheels, that’d be another story. But I’m not going to make my house look like a casino if I’m not going to make money.
Instead, Christmas lights are purely for show. All these electric icicle lights and colored displays and inflatable snowmen are for the sole purpose of telling the world how much I love Jesus. And there will always be those who outdo me. That’s the house I find, the one with the technicolor manger display, the all-plastic-all-the-time Jesus, Mary and Joseph, three magi (including the black one who I once overheard somebody describe as the “African-American wise man.”) Then to complete the scene you’ve got a donkey, a cowboy, a red-nosed reindeer, some elves, a fat Santa Claus, some life-sized candy canes, Noah’s Ark and a few other animals, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a roly-poly Mrs. Claus, not one but two plastic snowmen (one’s gotta be Frosty), a big blinking Christmas tree, some fake presents underneath, a wooden cutout of a silhouetted farmer with a pipe, a leftover wooden figurine of a guy bent over in his garden with the crack of his bum visible, a wooden goose with a scarf, and a spotlight hitting the roof to show a rocking sleigh and eight tiny reindeer, and SpongeBob SquarePants, all of whom were there in Bethlehem at the time of census under King Herod.
It wows the kids, and it kind of bowls me over, too, just thinking that someone spent the time to orchestrate this gaudy vaudeville. In other time and place, such a person could’ve dreamed up the concept of Branson.
Then the kids and I go home, hang up our two wreaths and leave the ladder in the garage where it belongs till April.
I once justified this by saying Jesus wouldn’t want me to waste the electricity. But I was rebutted by a Christian who actually reads the Bible who pointed me to Matthew 26. A woman came to Jesus with a jar of expensive perfume that she dabbed on his head. Christ’s disciples thought this wasteful, that the perfume could be sold and the money given to the poor. Christ said, “What am I, chopped liver?” (Actually, it was more like: Leave her alone. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.)
Lenny Bruce said basically the same thing, referring to all the gold in the great cathedrals that could be sold to feed the poor. But, he added, people like to go to spectacular places to worship. Nobody, he says, wants to worship “in a craphouse.”
So putting up lights is just our way turning our homes into Cathedrals. I won’t put up lights, but I will take to heart Matthew 26, but instead of perfume, I will go for another precious liquid. Flip Wilson’s hilarious character Geraldine used to say -- like when she bought herself a new dress -- “the devil made me do it!” Well I’m going to buy some 12-year-old Chivas and say, “The Lord made me do it!” and I’ll be lit up for holidays in my own way.
