The Lights Can Always Shine

BY DAN SZCZESNY / ILLUSTRATION BY PETER NOONAN

By the end of September, I’m outside stringing lights.

In our garage, we have every different shade, from reds and greens to the icicle blues and twinkling yellows to orange and black. We have strings, nets, gutter hangers and long rolls on thick plastic spools. We have those spinning ones that clamp onto the fence. We have the electric ones that look like flames. We have walking pumpkins that light up, and a large spider with moving legs and shimmering eyes.

Autumn in our home is a different sort of celebration. You see, we try to celebrate everything. When my daughter was born nearly 10 years ago, to a Polish dad and a Nepalese mom, we had a choice. Let her grow up free of both sides of the culture, or give her all of it. We chose all of it.

So now, our holiday season begins in early October, with the lights and candles foretelling the coming of Deshain, the victory of good over evil. The year will slide into black cats and orange bulbs as my daughter and her friends turn up the scare factor a notch. Not long after, the home is aglow with every light we have to trumpet in Diwali, the holiday of lights, and pilots can see our house! Soon arrives the gratefulness of Thanksgiving, and then the chaos of Christmas where we first welcome our Elf on a Shelf, Tutu, into our abode, and then the trappings of stockings and railroad trains. After all that, New Year feels passive and intimate.

But there’s more! You see those colors — those lights — are perfect for birthdays as well, and it just so happens that my wife’s birthday hits in early November, while Little Bean’s falls right around Christmas.

And me? Well, I’m an early February birthday, so the ladies offer to keep the lights up until then, five solid months, a grand slide from autumn to winter with the home and our hearts ablaze in color.

I remember the beginning of all this. When Little Bean was a tot, barely old enough to speak, we had surprised her by stringing lights up in the kitchen, a spoke of lights extending from the middle bulb to all corners. The ceiling looked like a colorful wagon wheel. We turned off the lights and waited for her to step into the kitchen.

“Oh my God,” my tiny daughter had exclaimed, the proclamation so direct and funny that we just burst into laughter instead of scolding her language. She spent the next 20 minutes wandering around the kitchen, looking up, grinning.

And so began our lighting adventures. A few at first, an acknowledgment rather than an explosion. But soon it grew. First, we’d teach her about each holiday, a practice that continues today. If we’re going to celebrate it, she should know what it means and where it all falls in the timeline of her parents. We’ll blanket her with tradition and family lore from every corner of our worlds.

She’ll be a child of colorful lights and the stories that go with them. And we’d make our own stories as well. Instead of the fall being a closure, the season would welcome our perpetual glow. The lights could show the way — of pumpkin and cider and treats and tricks, all under the bright lights of tradition and celebration.

Meanwhile, as long as the lights are here and as long as we’re zooming into the holiday season and the new year, I may pitch the ladies of the house on a new idea this year. Why not keep the lights up until the next holiday, Valentine’s Day? Or maybe even further. When’s Easter?

Maybe it can always be a holiday season. Maybe the lights can always herald in the next occasion, and maybe my daughter’s eyes can always glow in the twinkling light.