Alison Dye

Canada's Great Lakes

IT is Christmas Eve, 1954. I am seven. I am driving in the Arctic pitch-black through a snowfall with my parents, my 10-year-old brother and our Springer Spaniel Abigail. We are going to Nana and Papa's house on the shores of Lake Ontario, one of the magnificent Great Lakes on the border between the United States and Canada.

The post-war baby boom has begun to make Rochester, New York, a sprawling city. We live at one end of this sprawl, on Croydon Road between Blossom and Dorchester, and my grandparents live at the other, on Edgemere Drive.

There are no expressways in the Fifties, so a journey to their house is an hour-long adventure that pits our gleaming black and white Chevrolet Bel-Air against the dark forces of renegade streets called Irondequoit, Titus, Dodge, Seneca, Chili and Charlotte - and possibly against the Onandagas and Cayugas as well, Indian tribes of the New York State Iroquois Nation.

My brother and I believe they live in deerskin teepees near the lake and attack the White Man for grocery money. Therefore he and Abigail and I are crouched in the back seat, disguised in feather headdresses. Just in case, my mother, in the front, is holding a large plastic tomahawk. My eyes are riveted to what I can see of the passing landscape. Until.

Until a sight so wondrous and extraordinary springs up in front of our car that the two little warriors and their parents gasp and Abigail starts to croon. My father slows the car down and stops. No one can speak.

In front of us is a house that would, at any other time of year and during the daytime, be thought modest and nondescript: it is a two-storey white box, perfectly square, perfectly uninspired, and not in good repair. But this family must have a magic Santa Claus wand, or perhaps their own magic angel of the Christmas spirit who sprinkles love and stardust on their hearts all night.

For their house, their pride and joy, has been painstakingly adorned and lit up with fat coloured lights that outline the edges of the entire structure as well as the roof, the door and all the windows. Two trees and a row of shrubs in the front garden are like bonfires.

But the crown jewel of this display is on the roof: Santa Claus in a sleigh full of bright sacks being drawn by Rudolf and his reindeer. Two spotlights tucked into the snow at the front of the house magnify the extravagance in all its glory.

We are paralysed. Frozen in time. Through the white lace curtain dropping in endless reams from sky to earth, the palace shimmers like a mirage. But it is real. I want to touch. I roll down my window and hold my palm up in an arch, the way we were taught to feed sugar cubes to horses. A snowflake settles on my hand, opening out its intimate circuitry.

This experience was my first lesson in an awareness which has never left me and which imbues many of my Christmas memories: it is an awareness of the importance of darkness. The power and brilliance of that house came not from the lights themselves, but from the lights in reference to darkness. Everything is clearer when seen in contrast, every choice raised up to us in sharp relief when placed against a backdrop of opposites.

Christmas tree lights in the daytime cannot hold our imaginations or evoke our feelings as powerfully as they do in darkness. Who would trade a candle in the dark for a candle with all the lights on?

I am a modest celebrant of the external rituals of Christmas. But I am very partial to the interior life of that time which seems for me to be connected to these interdependent qualities of darkness and light.

I think of my cottage in Mayo where I have spent Christmas for the last few years. When I drive down the road to it on Christmas Eve, into a vast, thick darkness that makes Rochester winters pale, the lamp in the window does not make me think, Thank goodness, I am almost there. No: for me, the lamp in the window invites travel into the night rather than away from it. In Mayo, the real star is darkness. The lights are there to show it off.

A few years ago my mother and I spent most of the afternoon of Christmas Eve decorating the tree. The whole time we could hardly wait for the sun to go down. Especially at Christmas, when light against dark is everything, daytime seems shallow and superficial, not to be entered into but skimmed over, all surface like ice. Whereas darkness can be settled into, like a big soft chair, and light more fully apprehended.

When the tree was finally finished, dinner eaten, the nightime utterly black and dense the way we wanted it and the rest of the family gone their separate ways, my mother and I breathed a sigh of relief and turned off all the lights in the living room. Then, on my hands and knees, I plugged in the tree. We sank into the sofa and stared at this work of art in silence for a long time until my mother was moved to tell me something important about her childhood.

This is the kind of interior moment I associate with Christmas. And for me such moments owe everything to the healing power of Christmas light that shines most auspiciously in the dark. Annie Dillard says it so well in her lovely autobiography, An American Childhood:

"The streetlights had come on - yellow, bing - and the new light woke me like noise. I surfaced once again and saw: it was winter now, winter again. The air had grown blue dark; the skies were shrinking; the streetlights had come on; and I was here outside in the dimming day's snow, alive."

Alison Dye grew up in North America and now lives in Ireland. Her third novel, An Awareness Of March, was published this year by Sceptre.