DAVID’S DESK #163 - The Return of the Lights

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2019 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.


From our bedroom window, I can see a house on a cul-de-sac that is a block away as the crow flies (and we have a lot of crows in our neighborhood) but is three blocks away if I were to walk to it. Over the years we’ve lived here, this house has taken on a special significance for me. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, its occupants put up all their Christmas lights, the first on their cul-de-sac to do so. It becomes a colorful house of lights, shining in the night.

When, on a late November evening after sunset, I walk into our darkened bedroom and see that these lights across the way have come on again, I feel a sudden thrill of joy. I know that the Christmas Season has come once again with all its magic and mystery.

Seeing the Christmas lights appear on this house has become my personal marker that the Celebration of Light has begun, leading up to the winter solstice, Christmas Day, and then the beginning of the New Year.

One year, these distant neighbors must have spent the holidays elsewhere as their house never lit up. Even though throughout December, a great many other decorations and lights filled our neighborhood, I kept having this nagging feeling that something was off, that somehow Christmas wasn’t coming that year. Of course, come it did, but this feeling made me realize how much I had come to look forward throughout the year to the first moment when I see these Christmas lights shining through our bedroom window in an otherwise darkened neighborhood.

One evening a few days ago, with nearly two weeks to go until Thanksgiving, I walked into our bedroom and to my surprise and delight, through the window I could see the familiar burst of light and color. The Christmas lights had returned to the house across the cul-de-sac! And not only them. Our neighbors immediately over our back fence, whose house faces that cul-de-sac, had their Christmas lights up, too.

Since that evening, I’ve discovered other homes in our neighborhood have put up their Christmas lights as well: no decorations, just the lights. In the nearly forty years we have lived in this house, I don’t remember this ever having happened before Thanksgiving. In fact, part of the tradition the weekend after Thanksgiving is to go out and witness how in the span of two days, the neighborhood has transformed itself into a fairy land of lights. But now it’s happening early, one house at a time, a pandemic of light spreading around us. I feel I need to dig our lights out from where they’re stored in the garage and join in.

Thinking of the year we’ve had and how stressful and horrific it has been, I’m not surprised that people are eager to see some reminder of normality and of joy. Thus, the lights return. Not everywhere, not all at once, but more and more as people around here remember what they have stored in their garages and storerooms and decide not to wait. We need these lights now!

I take this as metaphor. If we need anything in our lives this winter, it’s a return of the Light that we all have stored away in our hearts and in our souls. Out of a cold, bleak year of division, anger, fear, and death, we need to festoon ourselves with a fiery hope, with love, with compassion, with anticipation of better and brighter days, and with a shining will to make the days ahead different from the days behind us.

The magic of our winter holidays, whether the Solstice or Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanza, has always been that in the darkest, coldest part of the year, Light returns. It is the promise that whatever the circumstances seem to be, Light cannot be extinguished. If in dark times, it seems to leave us, this Holiday season reminds us that it always comes back.

Light returns!

My distant neighbors couldn’t wait another two weeks for the traditional time of turning on their Christmas lights. The joy, the comfort, the promise they bring is needed now, and so they set their house aglow.

As we move on from this difficult year, we need to remember and set our hearts aglow as well. May we all be blessed by the promise of this Season. May we equally bless each other.

Let the Light return!