Boomers bring color back to tree

I was interested to read the other day that colored Christmas lights are finally making a comeback on the home decorating scene.

For the first time in a decade, USA Today reported, multicolored lights are approaching the sales volume of the white lights that have all but dominated the holiday landscape of late. The reason for this colored-light resurgence, the marketing types tell us, is that baby boomers – who else? – are getting increasingly nostalgic about Christmas as they age and are beginning to look back to their colored-light childhoods for holiday inspiration.

Boomers, as a Christmas superstore owner explained, “kind of revert back to the way things used to be, and they want to share that with their children and grandchildren.”

The truth is, all of us boomers started life as colored-lighters. We had no choice in the matter of Christmas lights, really. Whether growing up in big cities or small towns, there were few white-light displays to be found when we were kids. All of the houses and the Christmas trees inside them were done up in bold, festive colors – brightly glowing reds, greens, blues, yellows – no matter if the occupants were working-class or well-heeled.

Colored lights ruled for decades.

But then, sometime back in the 1980s, little white lights began popping up all over the place. They arrived first as single electric candles glowing from every window, a Currier-and-Ives decorating theme intended to make a house look elegant and tasteful in a Victorian sort of way.

In no time, white-light fever had spread to the outside of the house, in sophisticated, jewel-like outlines around doors and windows, followed later by the ubiquitous icicle lights dripping from eaves in every neighborhood. Eventually, the all-white trend took over many of our Christmas trees, too, displacing the Crayola color-lighting schemes of the past.

A quick check of the Web, where everything is worthy of lengthy debate, reveals that we have become a nation divided over Christmas lights. Online pundits of the colored-light persuasion accuse the white-light bloggers of being stuffy, unimaginative types, while the white-lighters defend their domestic adornments by calling the colored-lighters garrulous lowlifes.

White-light snobs sip wine and nibble crudites over the holidays, while colored-lighters guzzle beer and eat junk food. White-lighters are boring, lifeless decorators, while colored-lighters suffer from crude and excessive tastes. White-lighters are said to adore Martha Stewart, while colored-lighters are fans of NASCAR.

Christmas lights as class warfare. Go figure.

My wife and I are colored-lighters by birth who raised our children in a modern, white-light holiday environment. While the kids at first resisted our attempts at understated elegance, complaining that a Christmas tree without multicolored lights was a cold, soulless thing, they grew over the years to appreciate its simple, shimmering beauty almost as much as their parents did.

Which is why suddenly joining this retro movement toward colored lights might backfire on me. As most twentysomethings would tell you, mine included, there appears to be a fine line between creeping boomer nostalgia and early senility, and they might just have a point.