#3. The Lights.

I love Christmas lights. I didn't start noticing that I loved them until I lived in New York and I would go all soft at the first sighting of a string of colored lights bordering an apartment window.

One of my family's traditions was a Christmas Eve drive around the neighborhood -- after dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, a later tradition, after my grandmother got too old to come to Indiana for Christmas and insist that my mother make oyster stew for my dad on Christmas Eve even though nobody else would eat it -- to gawk at the gaudy light displays. I love the ones that are bright as noon, stuff on the lawn and on the roof, and all twinkling and blinking and chasing.

The season is about the lights, isn't it? Isn't it about light in a long, dark night, about faith that it is as dark as it will get, and now it's going to get lighter?