Holiday carolers from local theater singing "Mr. Grinch", swinging peace signs and Our Lady of Guadalupe manger scenes. A life-size dreidel dangled from a tree at the original house that started it all. (Yes, a dreidel is Jewish, y'all.) This is Austin, and this is my neighborhood. Just a block away from my house are the 34th Street Lights, a homegrown tradition started some 15 years ago, a tradition of self-expression through Christmas lights. And there's nothing you can do to commercialize it. That's what makes it Austin, too.
Every year thousands of kids and families and every kind of Austinite and ethnicity--suburbanites, urbanites, old young, college students, grandmothers--come down our street in droves walking and dragging in their cars to balk at about 15 houses which turn their yards and just about every visible surface into a virtual gallery of light. It's become more than than just Christmas lights, but an expression of life that's authentic and imaginative, which Austin loves.
A manger display nestled into the insides of an abanded 50s kitchen stove was displayed on the front lawn of one house, and I listened to two grandmothers say, "What's that about'?" "Well, it's about whatever your imagination can come up with."
I love this about Austin, this assumption that not you have to imagine your own Christmas, but share it with others and make a community performance out of it. I live in Austin because I love her imagination but I also see this city as a classic artist personality, an artist who'll keep singing her song but also who at times is afraid of being used for her imagination. As I hinted, Austin's creative population is very much afraid of being commercialized. Hence the monopoly board that decked the front sidewalk of one house:
(Tarrytown is a gentrifying urban neighborhood, The Domain is a Dallas-like glittering complex of luxury stores and condos that feels terrifyingly like the world of Edward Scissorhands, and The Drag is the once-local-business street of cool stores and coffeeshops around the university but was completely overturned in the last two years by doubling rents.)
The reason why the light thing "took" is I think people want something authentic to be a part of... not just a city or business-sponsored Christmas tradition but one that artists imagine, pay for, and do on their own. Here's to Austin, keepin' it real, and to my neighborhood, who in spite of an ever growing and transient student population is still remembering the joy of who it once was and will be... a community of imaginers!
Merry Christmas!
Happy Hannukah!
