Was out last night to deliver a Christmas present to a friend out in the country. This last week, we've had remarkable weather, mild and open, sunny by day (with an almost spring-like cyan-blue sky), sunsets streaked with apricot and rose, and a full ripe moon. Each night I've looked out on a landscape strangely blue with moon on snow... But yesterday was cloudy, and last night the sky was thoroughly occluded. As I drove west to my friend's house, the only light was the dirty-ochre town-glow of the city to the north. For the rest, I doubt I could have seen my foot in front of me if I'd been walking. In the country, when it gets dark, it gets DARK.

Except for the Christmas lights.... Along my street heading out of town, along the county highway, there they were--not every house lit up, but many houses. They vary, quite wildly, from the neatly prosaic to the baroque. I suspect they say something about the people who put them up. What do you make of someone who puts up precisely 10 red bulbs, 10 blue, 10 red, 10 blue, in a scrupulously neat row along the eavestroughs? Ah--a romantic with good taste: an old brick farmhouse with pure white lights draped gracefully among its shrubs and wound through the gingerbread trim on the porch. Some people go a little crazy and sling dozens of lights all over the place. Others are restrained. Some are monochrome red or blue; most are variegated. But all in all, it makes for a pretty display. The variety is part of the pleasure.

One of the better side effects of having lived through Interesting Times is that, properly received and digested, a few solid whomps upside a person's head may help to clear the mind of a great deal of unnecessary nonsense. I feel blessedly relieved of any need to assess another person's Christianity at Christmastide. It is none of my business whether the people in these houses are in a state of grace or not. It need not disturb my inner _wa_ if they're enjoying "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" instead of "Once in Royal David's City". If they worship Santa Claus or the "Spirit of Christmas" instead of the Christ Child, I can at least see that there's at least a trace of the Christ Child in what they worship--in the message of love and generosity, in the willingness to stop in front of Mystery, in the longing for that Something that Christians find in the manger. Whether or not they know it, Christ was born and died for my neighbours. The essential thing is that I know that he did it for me.

But the lights ... the lights do something. They have a curious effect on the dark around them. It's as though something from them flows into it. The dark among these strands of brightness is somehow different from the plain dark over fields and woods and cedar swamps. This dark is softer; it's less sheerly impenetrable and more full of playfulness, even mischief. Dark can be the midnight blue against which stars are shot silver. Or it can be just plain dark.

Whatever specific motive is behind them, whatever people think as they put them up, the lights are an offering to God, an oblation of cheerful beauty at the darkest part of the year. Whatever Christmas has turned into, it has at least made that oblation something that my neighbours do every year, without question but with deep enjoyment.

Not everyone will be making this oblation. Some are sick in body or mind, or mourning, or alone. They are in the dark for a greater or lesser time, not by choice; for now, they feel they have nothing to make the oblation with. Others don't feel the need for the lights: "What's the practical good of them?" They deny the need to make an offering at all. But then there are those who are full of resentment or bitterness or self-centredness. They have chosen the dark and the dark abides with them, because God leaves us free to choose the Light or the dark.

We can be lights, by our witness of the Love of God to this world, which sometimes seems nothing but night. We can be steady in that light-giving; and then, even if the darkness doesn't go away, it's softened and made somewhat less impenetrable and more hopeful near us, at least for a time. And we will have shown other people how it's done, this light-giving. That's worth something, I think.

The lights have lent grace to this plain place, and something of that grace will linger even after people take the strands down, and the year turns round and the days get longer again. But for those of us who believe, who are willing to take the risk of faith, the light steadies and strengthens and grows, from a small flame in the dark, until it explodes in glory at the next great feast: the Resurrection.