A Walker in the Suburbs

Watch a movie every year and soon you will be able to predict each comment long before it’s made. All of us marvel at Bing’s mellifluous voice and Danny Kaye’s smooth dancing. There will be a disparaging word or two about Rosemary Clooney, despite my reminders that she was George Clooney’s aunt. And it’s true, this film is probably not her finest.

Her sister, played by a dancer named Vera-Ellen, earns the most comments for her impossibly long legs and tiny waist. It’s not easy to pig out on Christmas cookies while watching this movie.

Every year I get the giggles when the housekeeper, played by the great character actress Mary Wickes, just happens to be reading Variety while tending the phones. “What housekeeper reads Variety?” I shriek. “Mom, you say that every year!”

But we all do. That’s the joy of watching this movie together. The ritual of repetition, of small family traditions that come around each year — part of the joy of Christmas.

Celia and I were talking in the car the other day about the meaning of Christmas. I was distracted, negotiating the traffic, thinking about what I had to do after I dropped her off. I mentioned the word “family.”

“I thought Thanksgiving was about family. It seems like every holiday is about family,” she said. And of course to me every holiday is about family, but in varying degrees.

What I should have said, what I wish I’d said, is that Christmas is about hope. It celebrates the birth of a baby king. Not a full-grown king but a king-in-making, and as such is more about the potential than the actual. It celebrates our turn back to the sun and days of warmth and light we can only dream of at this time of year.

It is, then, a day to celebrate something often in short supply in government, in families and in daily human lives — a belief in the unseen.

Every year for the past half dozen we’ve driven west into the rolling hills of Loudoun County to cut down our Christmas tree. It started as a lark and has become a tradition, one we uphold even when cries of “it’s too far” or “I have homework” almost rule it out.

Yesterday we took two dear friends, so there were seven of us in the car, and it was an occasion. It didn’t take long to find the Douglas fir of our dreams, hack away at the trunk and topple the tree. We drug it down the mountainside, paid for it and lashed it to the top of the car.

This morning I learned that the Snickers Gap Christmas Tree Farm is closed for the season. We just made it.

It is time for the annual Christmas lights show across America, when we put candles in windows, outline our houses, spotlight our doors — and in general thumb our noses at the darkness.

There are specific houses and entire streets I look forward to every year. One dripping in white icicle bulbs that looks like a winter wonderland, another crowded with mismatched Santas, Rudolfs and snowmen.

We have always decorated with colored lights rather than white, with no particular agenda in mind, just a choice. But I remembered as I began to write this post that the late Michael Kelly had written a column about white lights vs. colored lights, and so I found it online and read it.

White lights, Kelly said, “make the statement that one is a refined sort who appreciates that less is more,” and colored lights say that Christmas isn’t Christmas “without an electric sled and reindeer on the lawn, an electric Santa on the roof, an electric Frosty by the front gate and an electric Very Special Person in a manger on the porch” (that last phrase refers to the pageant at his Unitarian church).

While we have no inflatable Santas on our lawn, we are most definitely colored-lights people, a little mismatched and scruffy, never the first to put up our display and often the last to take it down. White lights would be false advertising.