If you want the holiday season to glow, you need to share a little light
Every year our family spends the month of November putting Christmas lights on our house. We invite thousands of strangers to view the 100,000-light display. Over the years we’ve received many questions about the display. The most vexing one is “why do you do it?”
Some people come with their own assumptions. I once overheard a child say, as he looked up at the twinkling rainbow above him, “These people must be really rich to put up all these lights!” I’ve had visitors thank me for loving Jesus enough to put up so many lights. In truth, we are a secular family and the lights are a significant investment for us.
We do the display because we love our community. We believe deeply that community is what we make of it. It is no one else’s responsibility to build the community we wish to live in. We believe it’s up to each member of the community to bring to it what they want to see.
We live in a culture that is increasingly transactional, awash in material goods and services to buy. We are the greatest consumers in history. Yet we seem to be less happy and more anxious. (In fact, science can attest to this.)
We blame everything around us for society’s ills — governments, nonprofits, each other. As the 2020 election results show, we are a nation divided. We have stopped seeing and hearing one another, and in so doing it feels like we may have stopped caring.
Gandhi said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
When I was in middle school, my class took a trip to the local food bank to volunteer. To most of my classmates, this visit was a one-off in order to check a box at school. But for me, it planted a seed. I was immediately drawn to their work — I was an industrious kid who loved to apply myself, and I loved meeting different people and hearing their stories. My home life was tumultuous, and the food bank became a place where I could go to find stability, be appreciated, and feel like I had purpose.
Similar to my experience at the food bank, I love talking with visitors at our light display. There are certain things I notice about people when I have thousands of them to my house over the course of a holiday season. We get a pretty good cross section of the community at our display — young and old, liberal and conservative, religious and secular. Sure, there are a few complaints and some bad behavior here and there, but I find that most people mean well. People are capable of finding and expressing gratitude. People, when they slow down and appreciate the little things, they find the magic. People are capable of coming together.
The reason we give and the reason we invite so many to enjoy our display every December is because we love our community, and we believe that if each of us does our part, together we’ll build the community we all wish to see.
Whitney Bowerman is a member of The Olympian’s 2020 Board of Contributors. She can be reached at whitneybowermanboc@gmail.com
This story was originally published November 13, 2020 at 5:45 AM.