Each year I find it hard to get into the holiday spirit, but this season has been the worst. It has been marked by deficits of time, and for days I’d focused obsessively on shopping I hadn’t done, cards I hadn’t sent.
More than ever, I’ve found myself consumed by the season’s obligations, unleavened by its joys.
It was in that mood that we happened to drive past a Tudor-style home in northwest Washington and a holiday scene that beggared description. A combination of lights and wreaths, trees, mangers, candy canes, globes, doves, angels, snowmen – two kinds – curving around an expanse of property making for the glowy-est, most riotous, seasonal display I’d ever seen. I asked my husband to slow the car to catch the crowd snapping photos, and as he did so, I heard a choir singing hallelujahs on the lawn.
Suddenly, it began to feel like Christmas. Maybe it was the extremity of the display. Maybe it was the huddle of people or the music.
Turns out it’s a little of all of those things, and the display is a tradition that has been going on for many years. A few nights later, I went back to take it all in.
Volunteers start putting up the decorations in October, says Earrol Price, a member of the United House of Prayer for All People, an evangelistic church that tends to the display at the home occupied by its leader, Bishop C.M. Bailey.
Price, a defense contractor, began tending the display with his father when he was 14. He’s 55 now, and the responsibility has fallen to him. He stops by the house every night on his way home to turn on the lights and check on the display.
He has seen generations of people come through. “They bring their family and kids,” Price says. “I’m not really in the Christmas spirit in October, but, boy, by the time the lights come on and you hear the oohs and aahs and people stop in the intersection ...”
“I think it’s just amazing!” says 7-year-old Amit. He’s with his mother, who declines to give her name, and two younger brothers. “We’re Jewish, so we don’t celebrate,” the mom says, “but we celebrate the Christmas spirit.”
They’ve met up with family friends, Katie Lampadarios and her two girls from Silver Spring, Maryland. Zoia, 6, is eager to show me her favorite snowman and starts running. It has been many years since I chased after my own 6-year-olds, but I fall easily into a familiar pace behind her.
Vanessa Caby walks to the display with her niece and nephew. Her baby son is being pushed in a stroller by her best friend, Bradley Chambers. He had noticed the display going up during his morning runs, but this is the first time either of them has seen it.
Caby hadn’t been feeling much of Christmas. “You get older and things change,” the 24-year-old says. But, “seeing this, you feel the Christmas spirit.”
“Even if you’re not a Christmas person, it puts you in a good mood,” Chambers says.
Lonnae O’Neal writes a column about family, motherhood, race, culture, aging and life’s small stuff. © 2015 The Washington Post.
