Orbs In My Oaks By David C. Bailey
Even my closest friends call me the Christmas curmudgeon. Who knows what my neighbors call me. Sixteen years ago our family found an affordable house in Sunset Hills. Built during the Great Depression, it had no air-conditioning, few closets, and an octopodean network of clanking radiators. When the telephone technician saw the wiring in the basement, he was aghast. But my wife, Anne, and I instantly fell in love with the 20-some mature trees — some of the tallest on the block — that shade the yard and pelt us annually with thousands of acorns and gumballs. The Christmas we moved in, a transformation was quietly taking place in Sunset Hills. About the time we hung our vintage Moravian Star on the front porch, three blocks away, Jonathan and Anne Smith’s daughter, home for the holidays from N.C. State, planted a seed that would grow into something much larger than any oak. She’d seen a ball covered with Christmas lights hanging in a tree in Raleigh and thought it magical. “We hightailed it down to Holliday Hardware on Spring Garden Street,” says Jonathan on a YouTube video, “and got some chicken wire.” And so Greensboro’s first “lighted ball” was created and covered with a single strand of Christmas lights. “We plugged it into an extension cord, took it out and flung it over the lowest limb and came inside and [my daughter] said, ‘Look, Daddy, a car is slowing down to look at it.’” Now fast forward sixteen winters, several hundred miles of chicken wire and thousands of glimmering orbs in the oaks later. These days during the holidays around 25 to 50 cars an hour slow down to view the lighted balls of Sunset Hills, aka Candy Cane Lane. Two years ago, I posted something on my blog about how all my neighbors had their balls up in the air and what it felt like to be the only one on my street without balls. I don’t think the post increased my popularity. I did hoist my Moravian Star as high up in our tallest tree as my surf rod and a three-ounce weight could put it. Walking my springer spaniel the next day, I passed some of my closest neighbors shooting arrows attached to strings into their oaks. One of them mentioned that he thought he saw me putting balls up into my trees. Did I tell you they were among the tallest on the street? “No,” I said, “I put up a Moravian Star and that’s all the damn Christmas you’ll get out of me.” As soon as those words were out of my mouth I knew they’d come back to bite me. A tough-skinned journalist, I’m used to grumping about the holidays with my ink-stained colleagues; however, the look of shock on my gentle neighbors’ faces spoke volumes. To their credit, they’ve continued to invite us to their holiday festivities, though they tend to steer the conversation away from things Christmas and anything arboreal when I’m in the room.
50 O.Henry
December 2011/January 2012
Photograph By Lynn Donavan
The Art & Soul of Greensboro