Western New York – December 2000

Lighting the Darkness

"Neighborhood lights and display contest? Good grief!"

Charlie Brown’s anguish was understandable, given the Vegas-style glitz that wins first prize for Snoopy’s doghouse in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Snoopy wasn’t the first to go over-the-top. There’s something about holiday lights that makes otherwise sober people go wild, and peaceful neighbors enter into wars of escalation.

But we have history as our excuse. Whether it’s the Hanukkah Festival of Lights, St. Lucia’s crown of lights, or the candle placed in the window to illuminate the way for the Magi, lighting the darkness has been part of this season for centuries.

Placing lights in trees was apparently a pagan custom, long before it acquired any Christian context. Actually, my Christmas Trivia game claims that German pagans originally decorated fir trees with the intestines of their enemies, which must have made for a jolly holiday. Maybe after a while they noticed that intestines didn’t really give much of a warm glow, and switched to candles. Or maybe they drank a lot of wassail and tried setting fire to the whole fir tree, then stood back and said, "Hey, that’s pretty."

Whatever its origins, the custom of lighting the darkness persists for one simple reason: there’s an awful lot of darkness this time of year. It’s depressing. It makes any sane mammal want to hibernate. And here in western New York, all that darkness is accompanied by both significant drops in temperature and the arrival of flakes of white stuff.

That calls for some serious cheering up. So around Halloween we start hanging lights, and many people don’t take them down until the Fourth of July.

In the good old American tradition of "bigger and better," we’re not satisfied with decorating our own houses. Nearly every community large enough to have a downtown or a park has a holiday light festival, so on one of these long December nights, take a drive:

Niagara Falls Festival of Lights

Niagara Falls, New York began this ultimate light show in the 1920s, and was soon joined by its neighbor to the north, Niagara Falls, Ontario. Both sides started the festivities this year on Nov. 18. The American Festival runs until Dec. 31, but Canada outdoes its friendly rival by running until Jan. 16. The nightly illumination of the famous Falls has now spread to hundreds of street and park lights, not to mention concerts, night parades and other attractions. You can check it out on-line as well.

Northampton Park Celebration of Lights

Despite protests from neighbors that threatened to rival the above-mentioned German pagan rituals, the Rochester area’s Celebration of Lights will again be held in Northampton Park, in the towns of Ogden and Sweden. For more information, click here.

Sonnenberg Gardens

Located in Canandaigua, Sonnenberg boasts "the largest light show in Western New York." The Festival of Lights illuminates its magnificent mansion and gardens, as well as offering ornament-making and story-reading by a Victorian Santa. If all the holiday cheer gets to be too much for you, stop by the Finger Lakes Wine Cellar located on the premises, for a different kind of cheer. Read more at:

Lights on the Lake

Syracuse’s version of the holiday light show is Lights on the Lake, a two-mile display along Onondaga Lake Park. The number of themed sections has grown beyond Frosty, Rudolph and Santa, to include not only a Victorian Village but the Wild World of Sports and Gumdrop Land. For more information, click here.

Alternatively, take a drive through your local streets and look for the house that reminds you of Snoopy’s. There’s one in every neighborhood.

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