In the darkest days of the year, when the sun doesn’t appear very much – and, when it does, stays unnervingly low – a miracle happens. In many windows, wrapped around spindly cranes on building sites or strung unevenly across cityscapes or country pubs, tiny twinkling lights pierce the gloom. Perhaps multi-coloured, possibly flashing, always hopeful, the message is clear: It’s time to get festive. If the origins of a winter festival are disputed, I know I relish the opportunity, or excuse, to get ludicrously sparkly. My family suspect I’d leave the fairy lights up all year round, if I could. You might think that, I tell them. I couldn’t possibly comment! But I do admit to an annual overdose of illumination.
When I was a child, at this time of year my parents unearthed a long-playing record from their collection called A Christmas Sing with Bing. Interspersed with the smooth tones of Mr Crosby (were you thinking of another Bing?) was a prize-winning letter from a young girl in the US, a place I’d never visited and that seemed as fabled and far away as the Moon. Delores – yes, that was her real name – had won a competition to describe "What Christmas Means to Me" and her words, set to stirring music, absolutely reflected my own feelings. She described an abandoning of the normal strictures – when bedtime became more flexible, when eating chocolate before lunch was allowed and when the grown-ups giggled about secrets and surprises. Most importantly of all, she finished her essay with a homage to a massive shining star on the top of the tree. Her father stood on a ladder and reached almost to the ceiling to put it in position. Delores and I might have been continents apart but we shared a similar affection for imperilling others in the service of Christmas cheer.
As a fully fledged adult now, I’m only too aware of everything that goes on behind the scenes. For every wrapped present there’s a frenzy of buying or ordering or enclosing the receipt in case it’s the wrong thing after all. The Christmas Day lunch doesn’t exactly appear by itself. My father often despaired of finding the one faulty bulb that meant all the tree lights failed and, even if we’ve moved on from those days, it’s inevitable there’ll be a battery shortage or lost remote control. It would be foolish to try and recreate that freeze-frame perfection of childhood. Families fracture, friends move on. People die. Perhaps a bug spreads as quickly as Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve, laying everyone low in its wake.
But I try and find the festive. Whatever prompted our ancestors to mark this time of the year is still alive in me. The first strains of whatever their equivalent of Mariah Carey was (actually, it might well have been That Song, it seems to have been around forever) must have stirred them to leave their candle-lit homes and seek out a shared fire. At some point, the lights went big and public. The Victorians were probably responsible for the emergence of the displays (you’ll already have noticed this isn’t a history lesson) as they hijacked and reworked so many of the "traditions" foisted on us at this time of year, but now there isn’t a city, town or village that doesn’t get all lit up. During my stint as a Blue Peter presenter from 1983-1987 – the Golden Years – I once "helped" put the Christmas lights up over Regent Street. In reality, men twice my height and four times my strength manoeuvred heavy ropes and decorations into position while I clung to the sides of the cherry picker. It was November at three o’clock in the morning and the eery stillness of the street below didn’t suggest any kind of celebration. But the switch-on was as wondrous as ever and it’s entirely possible that for some harassed shopper, impressed child or just someone on their way home from work this display gave unexpected, free joy.
When my husband, John, died five years ago, the first Christmas without him seemed irredeemably bleak. The house, once decorated to extremes and noisy with music, was quiet, bare and still. In yet another bout of mindless tidying, an attempt at distracting myself, I found a little wire punctuated with bulbs the size of a grain of rice strung along the mantelpiece. Tracking the thread to its end, hidden from view, there was the plastic battery box. I found the switch and the equally miniscule batteries puffed enough strength to breathe the lights into life. No use, really – there was no warmth and you couldn’t read by them. But – forgive the allusion – this sudden spark flicked a switch in me.
These are small, ambitious sparks of light placed where someone might notice them. It’s a message from one human to another in minute light bulb form. When that person is you, please take their tiny twinkle to your heart.
Janet Ellis will take over as president of Humanists UK in January.
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