Bright Lights in the Dark

It’s a dark time right now. No, I’m talking about the election or anything else happening in the world, although it is a dark time in that way. I’m talking about how it’s literally a dark time. The sun sets at like 4:30 in the afternoon, and even at like 11:00 am it feels like the sun is already going down. It never feels truly light out, even on the brightest sunny days. And when it is gray and cloudy and rainy? That darkness feels 10x more dark. Just this morning I walked out into the living room of our apartment at like 10:00 am, and it was so dark due to the clouds and rain it might as well have been 10:00 pm.

tl;dr It’s dark!

The one bright side of all of this darkness is that it’s now time for one of my favorite things: Christmas Lights! Multi-color, twinkling, set to music, whatever, it doesn’t matter. I love Christmas Lights. Even white lights are good to me, in moderation.

It’s not a coincidence today, on the darkest day of the year, was when I put our lights up in the apartment. We don’t tend to put up a tree these days, in large part because there’s not a great place to put it where we can enjoy it and it doesn’t mess with Anya’s cat tree. Also, it’s a bit of a pain to move it out of its spot in a corner of one of the bedrooms and get it out and put up. I love Christmas trees, but mostly to look at the lights on them. Putting lights up around the apartment is much easier. And has the virtue of being something easier to just keep up year round.

Yep, I know what you are thinking. I do have a tendency to not put my tree up right away once the holidays are done. Oftentimes it sat deep into March, and at least a couple times just sat out, lights off, until the holidays rolled right around the next year. Sometimes I’d joke with people about just making it an “all seasons” tree, and rotate seasonally appropriate lights and decorations. Now I never did that, of course. It's a fun idea, but would take much more effort than just putting the darn tree up.

Almost five years ago, however, failing to put my tree up was a blessing in disguise. It was March of 2020, and the pandemic lockdown had just begun. I was stuck in my apartment, alone, scared and anxious at the uncertainty of what was going on. On a particularly gray day in Northern Illinois, I walked into the living room, looked at how dark it was, and decided right then and there to turn on the lights. The tree stayed up and lit through the rest of 2020, and well into 2021, until I turned them off when I left the apartment to go downstate to get my first Covid vaccine shot. 

The lights did not solve my anxiety, or make all of the fears and bad things go away. They were Christmas lights, not miracles! But they did help, if only by driving a small bit of the darkness away.

Here, in December of 2024, the lights are once again up. They won’t fix the problems we all face, or fix the hearts of the transphobes looking to eliminate us trans people from existence. The uncertainty of the future still remains. These are different lights, sure, but they are no better at working miracles. 

In a few weeks, my wife, for eight straight nights, will light the Hanukkah candles in our menorah. And for a few hours on every one of those eight nights, the flickering light of those candles will stand in our window against the dark night of winter. It’s a beautiful thing, and I’m so glad to celebrate it with her.

We will make this holiday season as bright as we can for our little family, and for all of those around us. But once these days are behind us, and we find ourselves in the frigid darkness of an uncertain January, the multi-colored lights will continue to shine for as long as they can. They won’t be able to stop what’s coming, or protect us from it, or fix anything. That’s not what they do. But they will shine, and chase away a little bit of the darkness. And perhaps offer a lesson for us all of us. Now, we do have the power to protect each other, and to try to fix what we can for whomever we can. And maybe, just maybe, we can push away that little bit of darkness around each of us.