Their smiling faces stared out at us from Monday's Morning Call.
Daniel, with two front teeth missing. Emilie, with the enigmatic smile of a 6-year-old Mona Lisa. Josephine, with big glasses impishly perched on the end of her nose. Charlotte, who insisted on wearing her new pink dress to school Friday. Victoria Soto, the teacher who did everything she could to protect her pupils.
I know many of you were as haunted as I was by those faces, by that awful event. A world in which children aren't safe from gunmen at their elementary school strikes me as a very sick one. Traumatic events such as this make all of us take stock of our lives and our society.
This isn't a gun control column, so skip over this paragraph if you don't want to hear it. I believe it's preposterous to argue that the availability of weapons and ammunition clips useful only for killing lots of people doesn't play a powerful role in the shooting rampages that have buffeted us so often in recent years. Until our elected leaders stand up to powerful lobbyists and adopt a more sensible approach to controlling some of these weapons and ammunition magazines of mass destruction, we can resign ourselves to more faces frozen in time and tragedy.
But today, I want to talk about the closest thing to an antidote for poisonous days such as that one.
A night later, I drove into a brightly lit Upper Macungie cul de sac and was beset by children, many of them about the same age as Friday's victims. As families drove down the street and smiled at all the holiday lights, many of them were pulling over in response to the children's pleas.
What did the kids want? They wanted us to stop, drink hot chocolate and listen to Christmas carols being sung by a little choir and played on musical instruments.
Their goal, beyond spreading holiday and community spirit, was raising money for charity. Last year, they raised $225 for Habitat for Humanity. This year, they raised more than $300 for the Pediatric Cancer Foundation of the Lehigh Valley and the animal welfare group Peaceable Kingdom. Other recipients over the four years they've held this event, which keeps growing in participation, have been the Sixth Street Shelter in Allentown and St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.
Tracy Heberling, one of the neighbors, explained that they put the names of all the participating families in a hat, and the one that's chosen gets to pick the year's charity. "Another way we give back during this event," she told me, "is that we ask every family to bring either new socks or sweat pants for children in one of the Allentown School District elementary schools. We also collect gently used coats to donate to children in need."
As I stood amid the lights, listening to the music and watching the children run around, dark thoughts wrestled with bright ones. Twenty children will never see another holiday, and how many others will be scarred by the awful events of that morning? Yet in this place, on this night, there was music, laughter, generosity.
A reader sent me an email Saturday morning complaining about the juxtaposition of my goofy Christmas Lights Tour promo on the top of the page with the grim images and headlines from Sandy Hook. I confess I thought the same thing when I saw the paper for the first time.
But life is like that: a maelstrom of light and dark, evil and joy. Christmas celebrates the birth of the Light of the World. Hanukkah is the Festival of Light. One reason I love the holiday lights is because I see them as an exuberant expression of what this season is about. But anger, hate and evil don't stop when the calendar turns to December.
"This year was extra special," Tracy Heberling told me, "given the tragedy in Connecticut that affected many families who lost loved ones, including innocent children. That horrific event affected all of us and caused us an additional pause to be thankful for everything we have. We all gave our children an extra hug that evening."
My favorite moment every holiday season is sitting in our darkened church on Christmas Eve as we sing "Silent Night" and pass the flame of our candles until they light the sanctuary. What a powerful image that is. We can be consumed by the darkness or we can acknowledge its existence — and do everything we can to spread the light.
That's what the neighbors of Maple Circle were doing Saturday night. It's what the creators of those big displays are doing when they set out collection boxes for food, toys and money to help make the holiday a little brighter for someone else. It's what all of us should be doing with whatever gifts and resources we have.
We can't eradicate evil. There will be more Sandy Hooks, more Columbines and Virginia Techs and Auroras, more war, more hatred and anger. We live in a violent, troubled world.
All any of us can do in response is to spread the light. One candle, one Christmas carol, one cup of hot chocolate at a time. The darkness is out there. But it doesn't have to overwhelm us.
bill.white@mcall.com 610-820-6105
Bill White's commentary appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
