The lady with the hungry cat is looking for some kind of rainbow connection over the holidays  ( Kermit's croaky chorus in my head)  but I already mentioned where I'm at with the rainbow thing - a dark place,  more prison than prism.

Still, driving home last night I felt delight in the glimmer of Christmas lights.  One roadside copse had a few pines strung with blue bulbs.  I know a man who says blue lights are creepy and shouldn't be used at Christmas.  "They're fine for Halloween,  not for Christmas."  But I've always liked them: they don't seem creepy to me,  they seem calm.   I like their quiet counterpoint to all the bright festivity. The soft blue glow whispers joy instead of trumpeting it. Wearing a blue halo,  joy is calmly  present instead of ecstatically processional: a soft melody you hear and feel in your body and hum to yourself,  not the high-stepping pomp of fanfare.

But don't think I'm not all about the merry and bright.  I tell it to myself:  "merry and bright, baby, merry and bright."   How it feels is like the bright sounds a pinball machine makes while it bounces and flings your ball in a crazy pattern of points galore, all without your input - just a random, sweet tangle of shiny bells and lights,  flashing grace and more chances for it.

I'm just back from not long enough in South America.  Jacaranda blossoms were my blue lights there.  Sparkly Christmas decorations suffer in the southern climes; it's hard to compete with the brilliant,  long sunny days and humid air.  Holiday decor doesn't indicate a sense of brightness and light so much as a frenetic desire for attention.  The Christmas holidays are different in sunny places - they aren't a respite from the dark and cold,  instead they gild the lily.  It's like dangling tinsel from the fringes of a palm.  Too much, too much. 

In a northern clime I watch a darting flash of cardinal while my sister brags about Philadelphia's blizzardy landscape and I long for the heavy quiet of it here.  Things are hushed by that much snow, even the bells and lights.  Outside my window everything is held in the quiet pale blue glow of a snowy early evening.