3Advent Friday: Random Lights

I have always enjoyed a good outside Christmas light display--my definition of "good" is often minimilistically placed and tasteful. We all know about the other kind. But the first Christmas I was in Kansas City I saw displays that really sort of made the hairs on the back of my head stand up. No, not Chuckie displays or anything like that. And I don't know if this a trend that you may have seen where you live. Anyway, in a very upscale part of Kansas City--Mission, Kansas---on one or two streets I saw that people simply threw their lights way up in the stately oak trees in their well-cared-for lawns. Just threw them up---so there are all kinds of interesting lines of lights from one tree to another, from the ground up, yards and yards of white lights strewn among the branches of the trees, but with lots of straight lines too. I googled every way I could to try to get a picture of this, but couldn't come up with one. In some of the other older neighborhoods here in Kansas City, the neighbors conspire together to do some pretty amazing things with lights in other places. The Romany street display, with every tree trunk along the street wrapped in white lights is something. But this thrown light thing irked me for some reason. If I had seen it in, oh, say Waldo (on the east side of Wornall) or Hyde Park, that would be one thing. These are older neighborhoods but with a lower average income per household. Please hear me when I say that I know some perfectly nice people, even United Methodist nice people, who live in Mission. But something about this one neighborhood's light display bugs me. It seems to be saying, "we have so much money, we don't have to be careful about how many lights we put up and we want to show it." Or something.

I sound awfully grumpy about this. And I haven't really put my finger on what bothers me about it. The Lord knows I don't have to have symmetry to think something's beautiful; and I sort of am partial to these kind of random things usually. Hmmmm. When I was two years old and my brother had gotten a little record of "Brahm's Lullaby," I went into his room and tore it off the record player and broke it into little pieces. To this day, I cannot stand it when somebody plays that song or sings it. Somehow this light thing reminds me of that, but maybe not.

Ah well. Are we glad it is nearing Christmas so that Susan is not so stretched to blog everyday as she has made a commitment to herself to do? I will be glad so those darned lights in Mission get taken down or at least turned off.