C9 Christmas Lights

I arrived early in a neighborhood where a friend and I had agreed to meet for dinner. It was a cold evening two years ago, and the darkness had settled. Pedestrians whose paths I crossed were moving along the sidewalk faster than I was. I had time to kill before the Groupon restaurant opened, and I had not wanted to sit in the car.

I passed down several blocks of Boston triple-deckers whose windows were dark. I could see holiday wreaths on some doors and occasional orange light bulbs topping old-fashioned plastic candles before pull-down shades. The decorations had an effect. They had the distinction of being something where there could very well have been nothing to set off the season.

There were pockets of retail establishments in this residential darkness. From time to time a laundromat, a hairdresser, a convenience store spilled light onto the sidewalk. It was the display window of a hardware store with its aisles of crowded shelves that got my attention. Amid shovels and bags of rock salt stood an artificial tree with one string of large C9 Christmas lights threading its branches.

I was helpless to explain the draw of those bulbs; they might have come from the front porch of the house I grew up in. My mother used to direct my father in December to hang a string of such large multi-colored lights around the front door with its side panels. Each night before dinner one of us would go out onto the screened-in area and insert the plug at the end of the string of lights into an outdoor outlet.

The cold air on that porch would suddenly get bright red. Our hands and faces took on the color as well.

My mother was earnest about her simple decorations.

Two years ago I went into that hardware store and passed displays of screws and nails and extension cords and paint brushes. I found the boxed Christmas lights in a back corner of the store. I stood for a while with a C9 string in my hand.

This past weekend I located the still unopened box amid the last items to unpack in a second-floor back room. When I got downstairs, I popped the individual bulbs out of a plastic webbing that had kept the string safe in its packaging. I stood on a chair next to the sliding glass doors in the kitchen and tucked the string of lights behind four nails evenly spaced along the top of the door frame. The ends of the string hung down evenly on both sides of the door jambs.

 I inserted the plug into the outlet.