For more years than I can remember, Thanksgiving Day has been official outdoor tree lighting day at the Garver household.

Lights have always been one of my greatest delights of Christmas. Gifts are okay. Family time and all those meals are great. But the lights! Oh boy!

Mom remembers me as a youngster, standing on the front seat between them and jumping and clapping at the first sight of the Christmas lights strung from one side of McEwan Street in Clare to the other. So it goes back a long way!

We lived in an older farm house that had been moved to that site from another location shortly before or after I was born. It was never completely finished, as happens often on a farm, so the wiring was adequate and that’s about all.

Mom had also planted cedar trees and a Blue Spruce or two along the road after the house was moved in. By the time I was decorating outside, the remaining Blue Spruce was twenty feet tall.

My preferred light is (and has always been) the old-fashioned C-7s.

Those of you with an electrical background probably already know where this is going. I spent hours, sometimes over the course of several days, putting lights on that Blue Spruce. Then, came the first lighting. The routine was something like this:

1. Plug in the Christmas tree lights
2. Blow at least one fuse
3. Change the fuse(s)
4. Hear the annual admonition to never plug in the tree when the stove was being used, etc., etc., usually issued by Dad in a rather annoyed voice (I never did seem able to remember that admonition until it was too late)

There were also annual comments about wasting energy and money and so on. There were a couple of years when I determined I would never light another tree if it was the last thing I ever did.

The first year I wasn’t at home to do the tree decorating, guess who did it. Yep, that’s right. Dad. After that, Dad was out there helping to decorate whether I was there or not. Usually I was, but when I moved to Kansas, my sister, Margo took over in my place and for every Christmas trip we made, Neal and I went home every Christmas to see the new, and currently much smaller Blue Spruce at the new house cheerfully lighted and awaiting our arrival.

Last November, Dad went ahead of us to that place where the Lights never dim. When Neal and I went back to Michigan for the funeral, I wanted to decorate that tree in Dad’s memory. So after the funeral was done and we had some time to decompress, Neal, my sister Jeannie and I gathered lights from several sources and decorated the tree. The picture above is how it looked.

Just because we don’t do a tree down here in Kansas, doesn’t mean I have any less delight in Christmas lights or that I don’t recognize the official Tree Lighting Day, which is Thanksgiving Evening. Today.

So even though I’ll be having Thanksgiving Dinner with church family while Mom and my earthly family have their dinner in Michigan, my thoughts will still be up there.

And with that no longer so little tree in the front yard, pointing the way upward and onward.

©Copyright 2008 by Carrie Lewis. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Carrie Lewis’s website.