Christmas Lights

It starts after Halloween. There’s no specific when it happens, it’s a gradual building throughout the month of November, and then Wham! its full-blown presence hits on December first. Christmas lights on houses, around windows, wrapping around trees and lining driveways. Blow-up Santas and snowmen frolic on front lawns and atop roofs. Rudolph leads the other eight reindeer across neighbourhoods, and candy canes and cedar wreaths adorn doors and windows.

On some streets it’s a matter of pride that every house puts up lights so that the entire row of houses gleam in the darkness like a runway leading everyone home. But most streets have a few dark houses, either because the occupants don’t celebrate Christmas, they go away for the holiday or they simply can’t be bothered to participate in the tradition.

The most common form of decoration is lights lining the eave of the roof. They run across garages and up peaks and around dormers. Others surround doorways and windows, enhancing the geometry of house and making it shine. Some houses use a chain of lights that hang down in vertical strings from the roof line, like icicles.

When the new LED lights were introduced, it was easy to tell which houses had embraced the new technology. The colours were more subdued than the traditional incandescent bulbs, darker and just a little cold. The biggest difference was with the white lights. Incandescent lights shone a clear warm glow, while the LEDs looked more like an icy blue. In the last couple of years the manufacturers of LED Christmas lights have managed to adjust the colour so that it is closer to the cosy, more inviting incandescent white. As a result, along with their energy savings have made them much more popular.

In every neighbourhood, just like there are dark houses, there are always a few homes that take decorating with lights to the extreme. These houses don’t just put lights on the eave of the roof or on a couple of trees. In some cases every corner and edge of a house will be outlined in lights, showcasing the elevation lines at night. The roof ridge can be an anchor for cords of lights to run down to the rain gutter, and chimneys can be wrapped in red and white strings to resemble a peppermint stick.

There is one house in a subdivision just north of the 401 highway that puts on a spectacular light display every Christmas. The owners have covered every edge and opening with strings of lights in different colours. Not multi-coloured strings, but different colours for each area. The eaves are lined in green, the corners in red and the windows in white. The three trees are covered in blue, purple and yellow lights respectively. The tree nearest to the street is the one planted by the city. It’s a Norway Maple and bare of leaves for the winter. The yellow lights wrap around the trunk, starting just below the pile of snow on the curb and extending to all of the branches capable of holding them. It is a glowing column, with arms reaching toward the sky.

The driveway is lined on both sides with LED-lit, plastic candy canes and stars shine from the centre of each street-facing window. The roof is occupied by a Santa figure – lit up from inside – along with his sleigh and nine reindeer. Rudolph stands right at the edge of the roof, red nose gleaming, ready to take flight. On the lawn below, illuminated elves are scattered about with glowing boxes topped with brightly lit up ribbons. Some seem to be placing them under trees, while others are creating an elf-ladder up to the roof, stretching to return a package to Santa’s sleigh. If that was not enough, there was one more lawn ornament. The six-foot tall illuminated snowman, wearing a black top hat and holding a broom; he appeared in mid-November and will stay in residence until the first spring thaw.

There is a television show on in December called Invasion of the Christmas Lights. It showcases homeowners who go to extreme lengths decorating their houses for Christmas. Some of them incorporate moving characters, flashing lights, and music, and most end up with hydro bills in the tens of thousands of dollars for the month of December.