I find myself wondering where the days go at this time of year. I just wake up and get started and I notice a darkness starting to infiltrate about 3:30. You know what I am talking about. I mean, it’s not actually dark until about 4:30 but the darkness starts to creep in mid afternoon. It’s eerie. There are barely 8 hours of daylight in December. It’s unnerving. It’s also detrimental. Because when does a person have more to do than in December? And when it gets dark, I start thinking about bedtime. Even though there are still a good 6 – 8 hours of productive time to use. Now I know where the song “In the Bleak Midwinter came from”. My smart watch usually tells me to start winding down for bed around 9:30. I laugh. No self respecting workaholic goes to bed at 9:30 no matter how dark it is.
However, I have to share my kitchen these days with my daughter as we are both baking for a living. We need an industrial kitchen so desperately. The guys can’t ever have supper in there. Good thing we have a Pampered Chef air fryer because it does so much more than air fry and they can cook all their food in it. So while Lexie was baking her cookies tonite, I took the opportunity to run out for more ingredients. Butter, pecans…all the cheap stuff. While I was driving to my local supermarket, I was bombarded with zillions of gorgeous Christmas lights. There really does seem to be more people putting up more Christmas lights this year. Earlier too. Even if they’ve never had lights in the past, it seems they do now and the ones that always had the lights seem to have put up more than before. This makes my drive like a parade of Christmas joy. I like to critique the lights as I am going by. Good Effort. Close but no cigar. Why bother? Beautiful!! Stunning!! A lot of work, Bravo. What were you thinking? And my heart leaps within me. All that darkness lit up like the Northern lights.
We live in a dark, dark world these days. It can be scary. We crave light. We crave hope. We crave joy. Jesus is the light of the world and all the darkness in the universe cannot snuff out His light. As St. Francis of Assisi said. “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” When I see house after house, all it up, I am reminded of the light of the world. I am calmed by these lights. These lights make it seem like there is nothing awry on the planet and its Christmas as usual.
The ‘lights’ part of Christmas has always been my favorite thing. Hey, does anyone remember those bubble lights for the Christmas tree? My grandma always had those on her tree and since we had to sleep all over the living room floor when we visited my grandparents at Christmas (because we had 7 kids), I always chose to sleep right under the tree with one of these bubble lights in my line of vision. I was mesmerized by the bubbles. Eventually, they would lull me to sleep because I never actually ever saw Santa Claus on any of these Christmas eves.
But the lights still draw me in. They tell me it’s Christmas. They tell me all is well with the world (even if it doesn’t seem like it). Or that all will eventually be well. Taking myself on a neighborhood tour of lights, I could actually forget that the whole world’s gone mad. I sat in front of our Christmas tree for a few moments last night, to catch my breath and just watched the dancing lights bounce off the ornaments and cast prisms on the floor and wall and I thought to myself “I should do more of this”. I should do more sitting in front of the lights – breathing.
The Red Plaid Apron 