“But the prettiest sight to see is the holly that will be on your own front door.” – Meredith Willson

My mother loved to see lights pop up all around the county before Christmas every year.

Like most everyone else, she enjoyed the pleasant contrast of the bright Christmas lights against the dark of the longest nights of the year, but I also think she enjoyed the lights’ illusion of warmth that lessened the bite of winter winds.

The outside air never feels quite as bitter while the tiny lights are blinking from their temporary perches as it does when the lights retreat back into long hibernation in the weeks following Dec. 25.

Living in a house full of males, it was difficult for Mom to get going the proper level of enthusiasm and appreciation for the Christmas lights in our household. We made a few pilgrimages over to Callaway Gardens through the years for our area’s mecca of Christmas light shows, Fantasy in Lights.

Yet this trek became more difficult as the level of apathy from my brother and I only grew as we aged into preteen and teenage years. After one particularly inauspicious Fantasy in Lights trip, she finally lowered her expectations for Christmas lights viewing.

From that point on, the family tradition was established where we would load into our frigid car one night every December and drive around Randolph County to see what our friends and neighbors had to offer in outdoors Christmas pageantry.

While not quite reaching the spectacle of Fantasy in Lights, though a few houses would go all out, the earnestness of those who did decorate to share the festive spirit was a worthy substitute.

Experience soon taught us which houses or neighborhoods would be most likely to put on the dog every year. Inevitably, no one would be home at a few of our usual haunts leading to a sigh of disappointment as a porch light would illuminate a few of the darkened displays we were missing.

Occasionally, a usually reliable home would not decorate that year leading to lamentations of, “What happened to the So-and-Sos?” from our Ford Taurus, as if some catastrophe must have befallen the family.

Despite the expectations we placed on other houses, our own home never came close to approaching a Clark Griswold-worthy decorative display. While we all shared Clark’s technical haplessness for rigging up Christmas displays, we lacked his determination to see through our own retina-burning exhibition of light.

We usually rolled with some lights around our holly bush, a wreath on the door, and a Christmas tree in the window.

It was a red-letter year when we added icicle lights to the ensemble. Not the LED lights you currently see that look like real icicles, mind you, but the individual little lights you could string below the edge of the roof that with some imagination might invoke a vision of icicles.

It was very late-90s Christmas chic. Not showing off but not falling behind, as George Costanza would say.

Mom tended to keep our decorations up a week or two into the new year, flirting with the borderline between appreciating the holiday and descending into tackiness. She never decorated early, though, providing the proper reverence for Thanksgiving and allowing it to pass before digging out decorations from the upstairs closet.

Now, of course, most stores have their Christmas decorations out before Halloween. Some cities place their decorations before Thanksgiving arrives.

I understand why. Christmas drives a large chunk of retail sales every year, but it is hard for me not to think of Charlie Brown bemoaning the commercialization of Christmas in his holiday television special released way back nearly 60 years ago. The holiday charm begins to wear thin after two months, at least for me.

This year work and school and the various extracurriculars of my seven-year-old and all the other typical grown-folks excuses have slowed my progress quite a bit in decorating for Christmas. I only was able to get the Tannenbaum assembled and upright a couple of weekends ago.

Now time has grown scarce to the point where I must consider if it is even worthwhile to add any more decorations. Whatever I do will not compete with the neighbors a couple of streets over who have a blowup reindeer literally as tall as the height of their house.

Nevertheless, I think I will add a few more lights around the front porch. Better late than never. I would not want anyone to drive by and wonder, “What happened to the Finchers this year?” Mom would have approved of leaving the decorations up a few extra days after Christmas anyway.