Sometimes the smallest event can make an impression that lasts a lifetime.
One of those “events” took place every Christmas in my early years on the south side of Chicago.
The routine was always the same. On a cold and dark December night, my dad would load us into the car and drive to the Christmas tree “lot.” With the aroma of pine needles heavy in the air, we’d walk through the aisles of trees until we found a Douglas Fir we all liked. Tied to the roof, we’d bring that tree home and wait for my mother’s approval. (One year we didn’t get that approval, and it was a very quiet ride back to the “lot.” But that’s another story.)
When it was finally in its stand, my mother took over and directed the placement of the lights, the tinsel, the ornaments, and finally the “icicles.” Everything placed on the tree was from the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that, and I found great comfort in rediscovering those old, family decorations that had been stored away for the past 12 months.
I remember Christmas being the best time of the year, in a home that didn’t produce many great memories. Even the year the fully decorated tree tipped over and crashed onto the living room floor, was more an “event” than a disaster, in a family that also had it’s share of disasters.
But what I remember most, was when the Christmas tree lights were ceremoniously plugged in.
With the rest of the house lights turned off, the lighting of the Christmas tree was a magical moment as the living room walls became a palate of red, green, blue, yellow and white colors. The sense of peace and wonder that it created in my heart surprised me each and every year.
It still does.
Even though I’m the one who has been untangling the lights for years, and grumbling as I try to wind them perfectly around the tree, I’m still surprised how the lighting of the Christmas tree moves my heart.
It’s like seeing my boys after a long absence. When they walk into view, the love in my heart swells just like it did on the day each of them was born. You’d think that when you know something so well, and it’s so familiar, that you wouldn’t be surprised. But I am.
Some months ago, I had another surprise. A big one.
Working at Consolidated Edison’s headquarters in Manhattan, I was supervising an off-hours construction project on the executive floor.
As the carpenters and painters worked into the night, I took time to walk around the halls and looked at the artwork on the walls and the plexiglass display cases which contained artifacts from the founder’s early days in New York City.
Of course the founder was Thomas Alva Edison who invented the electric light bulb and developed the first electric generating station in the country, in New York City in 1882, serving – are you ready? – 52 customers.
But it was the very last display case that stopped me in my tracks, and took me back to those first Christmases in Chicago.
Inside the last display were some of the first electric light bulbs ever made, and my eyes moved from one odd-shaped bulb to another until I saw one final item.
Bunched in the back of the display, almost as an afterthought, was an old cloth encased electric wire (remember those?) with a dozen or more clear, marble sized light bulbs connected to it. Not realizing what I was looking at, I read the description placed next to it.
“The first string of electric lights used to illuminate a Christmas tree. Edward Johnson, an Edison inventor, lighted up a Christmas tree in New York City with eighty small electric light bulbs in 1882.”
Further reading told me that Johnson’s “Christmas Lights” started being mass produced in 1890 and he later became the Vice President of Edison’s electric company.
I couldn’t move.
128 years after they were first invented, there I was, standing in a vacant hallway, in an anonymous building, on a hot August night in New York City, looking at a treasure only a few have been privileged to see; the very first Christmas tree lights.
As I stood there silently, my heart and mind raced, and memories took me back to those magical moments I experienced every year as a young boy, when the tree was trimmed, the room was darkened, and the walls glowed in colors of red and green and blue and yellow and white. When those Christmas tree lights created a sense of peace and wonder that filled my heart.
Like they still do today, more than a half century later.
Merry Christmas everyone!
