In Defense of Multi-Colored Christmas Lights
My husband and I got married between Christmas and New Year. My parents hosted an afterparty at their house after the reception, so my mom bought tons of Christmas decorations in our wedding colors (black, red, and white). She gifted those decorations to us afterward, and for the first several years of our marriage, those were the decorations we used, along with a few nostalgic items from our childhoods.
It was only when the fake tree she had given us started looking like the tree from Charlie Brown’s Christmas that we decided to purchase new décor, at which time we discovered we had different ideas about Christmas lights. My husband preferred white and blue lights, while I loved multi-colored lights. I don’t remember what logic he used, but he eventually won the battle, and for years, we had white lights, inside and out. In our last house, the warm, white lights truly complimented the brown tones of our décor – Christmas always felt cozy. The white and blue lights always look beautiful; they have a wow factor that the multi-colored lights can never achieve; they’re the lights that are necessary for those magazine-perfect household decorations. Unfortunately, my favorite Christmas items, those nostalgic items from my childhood, always fell short of that white-light aesthetic. The red and green hand-knitted stockings (my own, plus new hand-made stockings knitted for my husband and my daughters), the wooded moose and snowman figurines, and the painted advent calendar my husband found for me at an antique store all felt mismatched and out of place with the white lights.
Even in our new house, filled with blues and grays, décor of silver and gold would be more aesthetically pleasing and my favorite pieces would seem even more out of place, but when the lights on our trees stopped working two years ago, I found myself fighting again for the multicolored lights. Fortunately, there are now trees that will change from white lights to multi-colored lights, so a compromise was easy to find. I couldn’t quite explain the joy I felt the first time we plugged in the new tree and it lit up with reds, blues, greens, and yellows. The multi-colored lights just felt more like Christmas to me than the white lights ever had. Still, it wasn’t until this year that I fully realized just why I love the multi-colored lights.
This year, those classic ceramic Christmas trees have been everywhere. My mom still has one, and my grandmother had one as well. I’ve always told my mom I wanted hers, along with the Christmas village that I always insisted on setting up with precision every year – the tree was always positioned as the big tree in the center of the town. It took these ceramic trees making a comeback for me to realize exactly why I’ve always been team muti-color lights. Christmas, for me, was sitting under the multi-colored lights of my parents’ tree or my grandparents’ tree. It was putting up the hand-knitted stockings and the decorations that had been collected over the year, not curated to create a specific aesthetic. My Christmases were always filled with color and favorite ornaments, and that’s exactly what I want Christmas to me for my own children. Christmas décor shouldn’t be about the perfect backdrop for family photos; it should be about the perfect backdrop for memories and nostalgia.
