Alef: The NEXT Conversation

The Importance of Lights in Winter

By Ian Epstein

Connecticut winters are reliably mild. When the mercury drops into the teens, it’s an event. The single digits retain a certain exotic quality due to an infrequency you can count on two hands using single digits. Not so in Chicago, where I feel like a Connecticut emigrant living in a foreign country. Here, December is reliably gray and sometimes the sky is too cold to let clouds float at all. December in Chicago marks color’s departure as everything turns white or black or gray or gets covered in dust.

On one of these colorless days, I saw a family of three on a mission somewhere. The dad was carrying the baby in a backpack and mom was leading everyone down the street. They were on their way back from one of those urban forests that sprout every year in the weeks before Christmas, selling firs and spruces that have been bundled up and made available for the season, and forming small oases of evergreen along densely packed corridors full of concrete and brick. This mom and dad with the baby on his back were swaying slowly as they walked home with a fir tree held up between them. It was a bushy, sweet smelling blob of green, about the length of a person suspended in mid-air. The baby in the backpack greeted the color and smell with outstretched arms.

This is a trip I never made. Hanukkah, the holiday celebrated in my family, is about assimilation and resistance to it. It’s about the Maccabean rejection of Greek influence. Hannukah is literally a holiday about dedication – that’s even what the word means. And there’s an undercurrent that runs beneath the frying of latkes, twirling of dreidles, and the lighting of candles that says faith and dedication yield great rewards from what might seem like just a little oil and dim light.

But as a kid, Christmas was a holiday with bright lights and lots of gifts and those are powerful enticements. That’s the perfect recipe for young kids, who are drawn to that combination of things-you-want and shiny objects, like moths to the flame. Maybe it was the influence of these ideas that inspired me to snap a hemlock twig off a tree in our backyard. I stuck it in a block of wood with a drilled out hole and I crossed my eight year old arms. My holiday jealousy cobbled together a cliché and I had a Hanukkah bush, which I dedicated to my single digit perception of the holiday. I dressed the hemlock twig in lights that twinkled with the colors of my envy.

But then there on the street watching this family brave the gray and the cold, I suddenly understood something about this indoor tree in winter that had nothing to do with the things-I-wanted-but-didn’t-have – it was a seedling and a reminder that spring was on its way from very little green, not unlike light that miraculously lasts longer and longer. From that vantage, it was suddenly a lot easier to see the similarity between lighting candles night after night in your living room and pulling a living tree out of the cold to wrap it with light.

Photo by Ralph Hockens, licensed under Creative Commons.

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