Light Up The Town
About seven years ago, Kim spent the summer in her home town of Wabash, Indiana putting on a show at the local arts center. A dozen years before she had put on another show in Wabash called Wait Til You Get To Wabash, which was written and scored by her old choir director at her local church, Suzy Jones. That original show was about the town being formed by the westward migration of people into the Midwest during the days of the Erie Canal. The Canal actually ran through Wabash, so the entire show, not unlike the classic Broadway show Showboat, was set on an elaborate canal boat set. Those many years later, Suzy took up the pen and piano again and produced a second show about the most noteworthy event in the history of Wabash. That show was called Light Up The Town because it was about the fact that Wabash has the distinction of being the first town in the world to get electrified. As a community, they went all in on this new-dangled thing called electricity and bought four arc lights that they placed on the four sides of the dominant and central town hall, and then pulled the switch to illuminate the town when all other towns in the world were dark at night. Both of these productions were written as musicals, which has been Kim’s theatrical area of focus, so as a noteworthy alumnus of the town, she was enlisted to direct and choreograph both shows. In many ways it was a very gratifying and fulfilling way for Kim to spend several summers as it reconnected her to her home town, to Suzy and Pete Jones (who remain dear friends of ours to this day) and, indeed, to Americana in general. After all, what could be more American than local summer theater about the Erie Canal days and the start of the Industrial Revolution in the heartland?
Lighting things up may have started in America with thanks to the likes of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, but the phenomenon spread across the globe to the point where much of the otherwise dark of night is twinkling with lights when witnessed from outer space. The electrification of the world has taken place over the last 150 years and all but the most remote areas of the world have access to some form of centralized electric grid to supply their homes and businesses with the power to run them and turn night into day. Americans have also adopted and transformed the holiday of Christmas from a solemn religious holiday celebrating the birth of the Christ child in a lonely and unlighted manger in Bethlehem in far away Palestine, into a glitzy cabal celebrated by Christians and non-Christians alike in the most pagan of manners with bright lights and tinsel. In the same way that canal boats and electric street lighting feel very much at the heart of Americana, so do twinkling Christmas lights. We all kid about how America has pushed the Christmas holiday season further and further forward to take full commercial advantage of the season of goodwill and present purchasing. Truth be told, there are signs of Christmas starting to appear as early as October these days, but perhaps the most important function of American Thanksgiving is that it stands in the way of pushing the holiday season too far forward.
The start of holiday buying spree is set firmly as Black Friday, the Friday following the Thanksgiving feast. The history around Black Friday is quite prolific with versions about slave sales after Thanksgiving to Nineteenth Century financial panics brought on by greed before the holidays. The most relevant historical connection to retailing was from the early 1950’s when hordes of shoppers hit the stores in Philadelphia the day after Thanksgiving only to find that many of the store employees had called in sick and so a bit of a retail mele to place. I also like the theory that retailers that operated “in the red” most of the year made up for it and got “into the black” from the discounted selling programs in the post-Thanksgiving days. Whatever the root of that process, it has been further modernized by some marketing wizard in the electronics business in 2005, following the dot.bomb, when online retailers decided that if people were going to be driven to flock to the brick and more tear retail outlets on Friday, they would follow that act by driving them to make online discounted purchases on the following Monday. Hence the birth of Cyber Monday. Can’t get what you want at the price you want it on Friday, no problem, just buy it online on Monday. That has all made this weekend the center of all retail activity for the entire year.
For my part, I went out bright and early yesterday (Black Friday) to make my TV soundbar purchase and today I am returning to Amazon, a teal blue range hood that was somehow wrongly sent to me when I had ordered online a tailgate folding step to attach to my new truck. I will take that back to the UPS Store today to return it to Amazon and they, in turn, have done their Mea culpa and sent me the correct item for delivery on none other than Cyber Monday.
This weekend is also the weekend when we traditionally all deck the halls with boughs of holy and put up the Christmas lights. No movie memorializes the importance of lighting up the house if not the town than National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, when Chevy Chase goes crazy with the holiday lights and send the local electric grid into overdrive. I must admit that while I enjoy looking at Christmas lights, I am always amazed at how much effort some people will put into stringing lights. Whether its garish traditional multi-colored bulbs or the traditional sort of simple and elegant mini white lights by the thousands set into the tree branches, its a lot of work putting them up and then. After Christmas, taking them all down again.
We have gotten into a bit of normal Christmas decorating routine around this hilltop and while Kim is in charge of the indoor lighting, I am responsible for the outdoor illumination. Several years ago I came up with a genius solution for the property entrance by buying two small artificial pre-lighted Christmas trees that I place on the two sides of our entry facade. They are both 110V strings that I plug directly into the existing timed entry light posts so that they all go on every night at dusk and stay on until dawn. Its all very festive and very easy to install and remove after the season. I have since expanded that to include putting timed battery lights on two little Christmas trees we have at the entrance to our Cecil Garden. The only thing hard about that is remembering where I stored the little lights from one year to the next. In fact, I think I have to go buy some new ones today since I can’t seem to find them this morning. I have decided that I will also buy some additional light strings to put up on the entry Manzanita tree to add some extra twinkle to the entry.
It’s that time of year and this may not be Wabash, but it I still full of Americana spirit, so its time to light up the town once again.