A macramé Christmas tree that only holds a few treasured ornaments has become the centerpiece of the Perry family’s Advent tradition. photograph by Stacey Van Berkel
A few years ago, we added pillar candles to our Advent calendar, which is just 24 tea lights on an heirloom cutting board, all of that atop an old card catalog. The number of candles lit corresponds to the day of the season, so the calendar gets brighter as Christmas Eve approaches. But then what?
We light our pillars after Advent ends — from Christmas night through all 12 days of Christmas — and beyond, well into the darkness of January, even February. It turns out, after 24 days of light, we grow attached to the candles, a source of quiet comfort there in the corner of the living room.
Last year, my eldest chose the pillars: three light blue globes. The younger will get to choose this year. The first year we did it, we used red pillars that I found in some drawer, and one leaked, melted down the back of the card catalog, spilling down the wall. There’s still a little wax on the paint and the outlet, a metaphor, surely, for something. But the lovely thing about candles, we remind ourselves each year, is that they don’t have to stand for anything, and need only to be light. — Drew Perry
For the Nickenses, a lone candle lights the way at a midnight service. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh
The lights moved through the church like a waterfall in slow motion, braids of luminescence falling from the raised altar to the aisles to the pews to the hands of each worshiper. Inside the minutes-to-midnight-darkened church, the light grew in an exquisite calculus: one candle flame to two, to four, to eight, to a constellation of pinpoint flickers as far into the darkness as one could see.
I watched my daughter’s face as she tipped her candle into the light of the person beside her. Markie watched the tiny flame, oblivious to the hundreds of other candles and the hundreds of other flames in the hands of hundreds of others around her. As the congregation began to sing, of that silent night and that holy night, she remained transfixed. She held the candle in her two small hands like she would hold a tiny kitten, as if she alone could protect such a fragile thing, as if she alone could keep that light alive and shepherd it to her neighbor. As if she alone could share it, but only after she first let the light in. — T. Edward Nickens
illustration by GC402/iStock/Getty Images Plus
I’m often outside in the dark when everyone else has tucked up for the night. I tell myself I have reasons for it — checking the mailbox that I neglected during daylight or wandering out with the dogs for a final sniff — but they’re only excuses.
The truth is, I like that snatch of time, just me and the stars, my eyes slowly adjusting to what had been a flat black only moments before.
Out in the dark field, looking back the way I’ve come, I find nearly everything I love spilling out of that house in light. The roaming star night-light of my younger son flashes past the window like a faint lighthouse. My older son’s desk fan washes the edges of the room in a green glow. My wife’s laptop silhouettes her face in bed, where I’ll soon end up and we’ll vanish into dark.
It’s a clarifying few beats out there alone, where I only see the light of my little family in our old house, and I know that everything that had been overwhelming during the day has now faded to black, snuffed out by the glow of a place to be and people to love: little lights reaching out to pull me home. — Jeremy B. Jones
illustration by CSA-Printstock/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images
The light of my Christmas dreams is that ethereal bluish gleam of moonlight on a snowy field, the peaceful reflection of a midnight clear.
Oh, but wait. Perhaps I’ll choose the dreamy lights of the fire-truck-red bulbs with which I will forever decorate my tree, those big, hard-to-find opaque bulbs that I ordered from overseas. That muted cast of red-hot candy red nestled among shadowy branches holds every memory of childhood Christmases.
Oh, but wait. There’s my stoop floodlight illuminating a bowed wreath. Candlelight on windowsills. Car headlights heralding a holiday homecoming. The light of a star in the East.
Lighten your heart. Be delighted. A light for the world beams softly from a Bethlehem manger. — Susan Stafford Kelly
illustration by YOTUYA/iStock/Getty Images Plus, JDawnInk/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images
On a Christmas Eve in the mid-1980s, miles from home, my parents’ old brown station wagon finally gave up. No cell phones, no pay phones around — we had to walk home. I was 5 years old, my brother 7, my parents almost 10 years younger than I am now. All I can remember is how safe we were together, and how brilliant the stars were against the black-blue sky in the sharp, cold air.
Light travels fast. It takes centuries for the North Star’s bright glow to reach us. The starlight we see is moments — twinkles and flickers — that happened centuries ago. We are making memories from memories. More than three decades after that Christmas Eve, I can still see the light of those stars in that way, on that night, as four people who will never live long enough to see the light Polaris makes today.
Many of those friends and family with whom we celebrated Christmas the next day are gone now. I can still see their lights, though. Many of the stars that we see shining have been dead for centuries, but for us, they still shine like they did that Christmas Eve, shine like those we love, they shine. — Eleanor Spicer Rice
illustration by Elena Malgina/iStock/Getty Images Plus
The candle race runs every night during Hanukkah. You know that Jews light candles to commemorate the sacred oil that lasted eight days, but what you don’t know is that more than 2,000 years later, as kids, we would root for one of the candles. Every night, after the prayers, as the candles burned down, we’d try to guess which would last longest. It’s ridiculous — the candles burning, visible from outside, were a lovely symbol of faith, and of something that made us a bit different, but inside, we would breathlessly sportscast: “The red looks strong, but oh, the wick just drooped and it’s melting fast! Looks like blue has the edge now!”
A thing for kids to do and laugh about. Yet it’s perfect. Hanukkah isn’t about gifts; it’s about spirit, about endurance, about light in a time of darkness. You’re not supposed to read by the light of the Hanukkah candles; they do no work, even until the last wick gutters and smokes. Their job is only beauty, only remembrance. So if the candle race was silly, it still kept us focused on the light. — Scott Huler
Our candelabra is ordinary, which is perhaps the most absurd phrase I’ve ever typed, but it’s true nonetheless. Especially when compared to its inspiration — the Ghost of Christmas Present’s grandly ornate candelabras dripping with wax and crystal in A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott, a holiday staple in our home. It was six years ago, during one of our family’s many viewings of the movie — right after the Ghost, bathed in candlelight, tells Ebeneezer, “Come in, and know me better, man” — that our daughter Oona, 4 at the time, pointed up at the television and said in her sweet, tiny voice, “Can we get one of those?” Who could say no? I ordered the candelabra — a foot-high, matte-black number that holds five candles — before the film had ended, and it was christened as our Christmas dinner centerpiece a few days later. It found a home atop our hutch after the first of the year, and has returned to its place of honor in the middle of our dining room table every December since. Oona isn’t as tiny anymore, and having a candelabra on our table may not be as thrilling as the first time, but the light twinkling in her eyes is just as bright. — Todd Dulaney
At Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, a waxing crescent moon shines over the coast. Its shape has inspired many a mariner — and even a few musicians, including the author, whose notation for “God Bless the New Moon” appears above. photograph by Daniel Pullen
As much as we love the full moons and have named them to fit our fancy through the year, all phases of luna begin with the beguiling, slender curving disc, that calcium-white slip of light we call the new moon.
Sometimes she shows us her small wondrous arc accompanying a darkened sphere, both silhouetted by starlight, and we may be reminded of an ancient ballad’s lines:
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon
With the old Moon in her arms.
Upon seeing that image from the ballad, those on the ship of Sir Patrick Spens feared a dreadful storm. Others may hear, or feel, music of the spheres, blithe melodies from the new moon, for vibrations do come with the light that takes just over a second to reach our Earth. Light from above has guided a lost child home from a mountain wild, and light, likewise, guided three kings from their Far Eastern pavilions past field, fountain, moor, and mountain to find a certain infant way away to the West sleeping in a hay-bound manger.
Just as we count the suns of our mornings, so too do we follow the moon’s waxing and waning over our months, for at the end of every fourth week, for only a few moments hanging there as it sets in the western sky, comes that bright slender arc, perhaps with the old moon, perhaps without, and either way, seeing her, we may sing this old coastal people’s prayer of safe home and light: God bless the moon. I pray I see another. — Bland Simpson
The camera is my calling. Its warm light bids to stand before it. To appear calm. To tell stories. But light can be as unnerving. When an angel with good tidings appeared before shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night, the light terrified them.
I’ve peered into the camera’s light on many Christmases, many Eves, sometimes with no good news to deliver. But stories about charity and mercy, heroism and homecomings, are what I thrive on — not trouble and tragedy. It brings me joy to put a shine in the eyes of people, especially in this season of light.
Whether I’m in the field or in the studio, anxiousness can creep in as I wait; nervousness never goes away. So I take in a deep breath. I might say a mantra or a silent prayer. Then it’s time. The lights go on, the live camera trains on me. Then, as I gaze into the lens, it’s as if the angels command: Fear not. Stage fright be gone. Send the darkness fleeing.
I read the news and tell my stories and then, after my job is done, I exhale. Even during the Yuletide, being on camera, in front of the light, is my calling. But I long to be home for Christmas. Once the light fades to black, and all is calm, I’m finally able to bask in the glow of this wonderful time of the year. — Bryan Mims
illustration by Anna Mikhaylova/iStock/Getty Images Plus
We don’t think much about life before electric lights, except when a passing thunderstorm or fallen tree limb knocks us briefly back to the Dark Ages. Even then, we can still read by the glow of our cell phone screens or grab a flashlight and try to find fresh batteries in the dark. Pre-Edison experiences are rare in 21st-century lives.
It seems kind of romantic, for a little while at least, this idea of living by the flicker of candlelight. Until you actually try it.
On a winter night last year, I took a candlelight tour in the historic village of Old Salem. After a brief lesson on 18th-century holidays, Moravian-style, we were handed metal candle lanterns and lead out into the dark streets.
It’s awkward work, making your way through an 18th-century night. I struggled to hold my lantern close enough to cast a faint circle of light but far enough from my body that I didn’t immolate myself. I had to contend with cobblestones, pick my way over uneven brick paths, and step carefully to navigate rickety wooden steps.
As I made my way behind my guide, glad that I wasn’t burdened with her long skirts – and that the streets were mostly free of the horse apples that would have mined my ancestors’ paths — I wondered how people lived like this. How many broken ankles, burned fingers, and squinty eyes did it take to navigate my great-grandmother’s nights?
These days, there are movements devoted to embracing life by candlelight. There are candle meditations — the better to open your third eye — and suggestions that we embrace our natural circadian rhythms with less light pollution.
It all sounds tempting, actually. Until you’re stumbling through the dark on a winter night, licking the finger you just singed with melting beeswax.
It’s enough to give a girl the vapors. — Kathleen Purvis
illustration by Alena Eremeeva/iStock/Getty Images Plus
“Regida fegida mother-rippin’ son-of-a …”
“Dad, are you OK?” one of us asks.
“I oughta take these lights back to the store and wring ’em around their neck!”
I can feel Mom’s eyes roll from across the living room. “That’s the Christmas spirit, Dear,” she says as she cracks open a cardboard box and lifts out a crinkly plastic tray of red and gold ornaments.
I don’t know how my father ended up as our family’s official Hanger of the Christmas Tree Lights, but evidently, it was a permanent post. Every year, Dad strung the lights. Every year, his patience ran out before the green cords were untangled.
My emotions in response to the spectacle of Dad’s annual battle with the lights changed with my age — concern, disregard, annoyance, amusement.
Now that I’m an adult and a parent myself, I find that I’ve somehow become Hanger of the Lights for my household. Smooshed between the wall and the Fraser fir with a cord of lights draped over my shoulder and needles pricking my cheek, I mutter my own G-rated curse words and feel a new emotion towards my father: gratitude. — Karen Langley Martin
All aboard! This magic-filled train ride through a Montgomery County wonderland includes seasonal sweets, plenty of cheer, and a few extra-special passengers.
Communities across the state celebrate the holiday season with sparkling lights, vibrant displays, and festive events that bring joy to the world.
North Carolina’s celebrated homes and historic districts are never more beautiful than by candlelight at Christmastime.
The thrill of the hunt takes on new fervor during the holidays. Seek and find in Randolph County, where the bounty of antiques can tempt a picker to abandon her list.
