Christmas joy can always be found, if you know where to look for it

Next year, Christmas cheer will dance and prance in every nook of our little Lowcountry yard.

I say that every year, with visions of Woody the Lawton Stables Clydesdale pulling a jingling sleigh full of after-Christmas-sale twinkling lights up to my bah-humbug yard.

And every year, this dazzling dream turns into a sack of coal.

We live too close to the airport to go full Griswold. We want Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer — not the jumbo jets — to think our roof is a landing place.

But if deer like the ones that dine on our bushes all year can have noses so bright on Christmas Eve, can’t we?

I long to be like my neighbor who has ribbons of sapphire blue lights circling large tree trunks in his front yard, and delicate lines of emerald green lights that turn plain crape myrtles into Vincent van Gogh masterpieces on our warm, starry nights.

Two angels stand nearby, dressed in white lights with golden wings, halos and trumpets.

Simply driving by it is like getting a bicycle for Christmas.

I envy other decorators, especially the ones who go hog wild.

They’re spreading joy.

Even when it’s a hassle, and expensive, and we don’t even know them.

GENERATIONS OF JOY

Up in Sheldon, the North Pole of Beaufort County, Bam Robinson lights up this harsh world by wrapping his 2011 Dodge Ram pickup truck with 5,000 Christmas lights.

Dove Street on Hilton Head is once again the wonderland it became 30 Christmases ago when Rob Lolik innocently put lights in his yard to celebrate a new daughter.

Lolik and neighbor Paul Beckler proceeded to go hog wild, draping red, blue and green joy through overhanging oaks and bristling palmettos up and down the sandy lane.

Simply driving down it is like getting a pony for Christmas.

Margaret Howell Up De Graff brought her first-grader, Jorden, to “look, look” at it this year, just as her parents, Michael and Mary Howell, used to bring her as a child.

Before that, they flocked to a South Forest Beach lane to see the wooden cartoon-character cutouts made by fire chief Dave MacLellan.

This year on Dove Street, a wooden reindeer made by a former neighbor, builder Earl Morse, lives on atop a mailbox, more lights on it than can be found in my full yard.

But this year is a tad different. We have three little candle lamps glowing in a front window.

CHRISTMAS EVE

Most people can’t even see them.

Their bright electric flames are hidden by a car in the driveway and a bush that we let grow like a weed because butterflies like its purple blooms.

The special candles came from Mama, handed down about the time her age-twisted fingers and aching body made it too hard to put them in her windows out in the country.

The candles were always a beautiful sight along a dirt road in the outskirts of a Georgia crossroads called Zebina.

But there as well, few people would see these simple signs of Christmas joy because they were so far from the road, and so far from “civilization.”

The dark night sky there explodes with stars. It’s easy to envision birth in a barn, shepherds watching their flocks by night, and wise men studying the heavens.

You might say the candles have an inner glow.

They reveal Mama always lighting her corner of the world, whether or not anyone is looking.

They tell of her stylish Christmas creativity, like making potato rolls, graham cracker fruit cakes, cards in calligraphy. They show her steadfastly clinging to a Styrofoam angel ornament her first child made in first grade.

If you listen closely, the candles can recite whole passages from Mama’s favorite seasonal book, “Christmas in Georgia” by Celestine Sibley.

And they remind me that Mama somehow always had a special Christmas gift for her three children, even though her cupboard of worldly goods was often barren.

Visions of those sacrificial gifts — a model car, a genuine leather football, a football uniform complete with shoulder pads — still dance in my head and put a lump in my throat on Christmas Eve.

No, electric candles can’t talk.

But even if you can’t see them, they reveal a rock solid faith that has kept Mama’s head above water for 93 Christmases now.

Christmas joy is always there, if you know where to look for it.

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.