Observations that I share here, come from here, and I hope you all know this. What I see, what I feel, say, pay attention to, notice, or believe, you do not have to see, feel, say, pay attention to, notice, or share the belief. This strange little haven on the monumentally bizarre world wide webs has always been a spot where my brain can rain, and I’ve always left it up to you to decide if you wish to dance in it, or shelter from it under umbrella and some Gore-Tex parka.
Today I realize that many of you won’t feel the same, that many of you probably observe the opposite of what I’m about to speak of, and to that I say: FANTASTIC! Truly, fantastic. I hope, so many of my hopes, that you have noticed the opposite of what I have noticed, and that you feel differently. If so, I implore you to ring out and say so in the comments, to tell us all tales of places that feel different, that feel better, and that have gone another way despite it all. We shall see.
Having come through the Halloween holiday just recently, having bumbled through the Thanksgiving debauchery that is stuffing ourselves silly with a tabletop of food, and now waltzing our merry way into the big gun of the holiday season, Christmas, my mind has been full of a strange observation that brought about a bit of heartache. If I’m honest, it’s more than a bit of heartache, it’s a swelling punch in the chest where that little kernel light of nostalgia lives, the place that makes you want to say “Back when I was young…” and trail off into some wispy diatribe about the beauty of what once was.
It was a lack that alerted me, more so than the presence of something else. It was the lack of orange lights or spooky skeletons around Halloween, a lack of pumpkins carved to look like ghosts or ghouls, zombies barfing brains, or smiling jack-o-lanterns. It was the startling lack of even front porch lights on, on Halloween night, the lack of bowls placed out even at the quiet homes where they can’t answer the door for trick-or-treaters, hell, it was the lack of trick-or-treaters over these last few years.
Now, it’s another lack, and though it might still be early this year, I noticed it too last year, the year before, and the year before that. Driving around my sleepy little town used to look like you fell directly into a Hallmark movie, one that probably stars Lacey Chabert and probably involves a big city guy and a small-town hunk that owns his late parent’s tree farm or something. Everywhere you looked, lights, decorations, snowmen, music. Every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving in Helena, there was the Parade of Lights in which anyone could enter a parade float, travel down the length of the walking mall with fanfare and almost the entire town out to support. Anchoring the festivities was Santa Claus, and I mean THE Santa Claus, the actual one, I’m convinced of it. Photo proof attached below.
Over the last few years, things have changed. Fewer and fewer people come out for it, the parade floats have mostly been replaced by people towing their own snowmobiles on flatbed trailers, or driving those side-by-side four-wheeler type things with big stickers advertising Monster Energy Drinks or Red Bull or any number of other gas station favorites. Last year, there was no parade, instead they simply had the “floats” stationary on the sidewalk and people could walk by and look at them. There were 3, and that’s being generous as one was literally a plastic tree on a tiny trailer with a single strand of lights.
This long-winded rant about the slow decline of festivity and community based interaction is about something bigger, and for me, it’s the why. WHY have things changed so much? Why are community-based events so much quieter now, why do fewer people (at least here, remember I’m not commenting on what might truly be a Hallmark-esque haven wherever you call home) hang lights, come to parades, carve pumpkins, or ask for treats instead of tricks? I wonder of this, and I look back at my own photos, my own observations, and I cannot help but notice a trend.
That trend emerges with even greater clarity for Sarah and I, as it might for any of you feeling the same and also in the same position we are in, and I think that’s because we’re co-raising teenagers.
Distraction, in the end, just simple distraction.
We’ve had this chat before, I wrote an entire piece on it back in April, and it’s below for any who might have missed it.
Nevertheless, I think we’re all victims to this now, this great distraction, this constancy of something, of everything, to provide the distraction. With our mobile phones, with streaming services piping in fresh, hot content 24/7 onto our giant TVs on our walls, onto our little iPads on our laps, onto our even littler iPhones in our hands, with any song you can ever imagine at your fingertips, every film you’ve ever seen a click away, how then are we ever bored?
If we’re never bored, how then do we seek out something to cure that boredom? How then do we need something else to make us feel connected. We’re always connected, aren’t we? Always.
I’ll ask you a simple question, and perhaps you’ll tell me it’s not so simple at all, but I’ll ask all the same: What happens when we are no longer ever bored, what happens when we no longer have to wait a week for an episode of our favorite tv show, when we no longer have to find a way to distract ourselves, as all things are instantly in our palms?
What happens on a bigger scale, to community as a whole, as we become further and further isolated? Has this great wave of distraction taken away our collective efforts to be part of more communal based things? Has it stripped away the want as it decimated the need?
I know it seems a silly metric to define my own observation, but it’s the damn lights in the end that tipped me off, that got me wondering in some late night shower that had me asking bigger questions from smaller things. The lights, and as a chaser of the light, I suppose it makes sense. I remember driving as a child through this town, half the population then as now, and seeing the whole thing lit up. Everywhere, lights, everywhere, twinkling.
The lights were, and I still think are, a message, a signal fire of its own sort, that let everyone else know, proudly, Hey, we are here, we’re with you in this darkness, we’ll help shine it out. Winter here, especially here in Montana, is brutal. It’s dark until almost 9 am each morning, and then dark again at 4:30pm each evening. It’s cold, freezing cold with temperatures often hitting into the -40s Fahrenheit with wind chill for weeks and weeks at a time. Then, the snow. Mountains and mountains of snow that have you up before sunrise to shovel off the driveway, sweep off the cars, and hope the plows make it to your road before you have to go. It’s brutal. Plain and simple.
The lights help, they’ve always helped. They used to go up early in the season, they used to stay up later, a little message of hope that the warmth will return, and that until it did, we’d defiantly throw glow into the gloom. As a child, my Dad would comment anytime we drove through town, labeling any house without a single light as a “Bah Humbug” house. We’d tsk, we’d shake our heads, we’d feel sad for them, albeit a bit disappointed.
Now, it’s more humbug than it is hopeful, more darkness than light. Not always, not everywhere, but as a whole, it’s so much less light. I know this because I see it from where I live, elevated above the town in a jet-black house like Edward Scissorhands, a perfect view of the twinkling that does, or does not come.
Maybe it’s not the phones, maybe it’s not Netflix or HBO Max, or Hulu’s, or TikTok's fault, maybe. I don’t know, but something shifted, something changed, and we’ve all gotten so much quieter in our collective spirit. We’ve all battened down the hatches just a bit too tightly, forgot that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. That the Signal Fire dies if we do not spread its message, if we do not light our own torches to show those miles away to do the same. Something changed, and it hurts.
Maybe you can tell me, maybe you can shine a little light of your own by telling me it’s not the same, not for you, not where you are. Maybe it’ll be the reminder you needed to put the lights up on your own home, no matter what you believe, what represents the holiday for you, be it Santa or the Menorah, Yule logs, or nothing at all. It’s just light, in the end, just a reminder that we’re all in this darkness together, and together, we can push back the shadow.
At least until the warmth returns. At least until the sun rises a bit earlier, and sets a bit later. At least until we’re there. At least.
Ring in if you please, tell me your opinions, tell me what you see. Light the lights, spread the warmth, hold the hope.
We hung our lights once,
dancing in squares with strangers.
Did this fade away?
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