[Editor’s Note: In the coming days, some persons present at the Christmas tree lighting will be telling the stories of their favorite Christmases then and now, leading off with Police Chief Scott Bixby.]
[img]2902|right|Photo, Diane Agate||no_popup[/img]No matter how technologically slick the world grows, an old-fashioned Christmas stubbornly remains a contemporary joy.
Last evening’s Downtown Christmas tree lighting just outside of the historic Culver Hotel only enhanced the tingling feeling that adults recalled from days when they were three feet shorter than they are now.
No matter the astronomical sophistication of workaday life, the sparkling eyes of toddlers and the just-aboves would have illuminated Town Plaza on this night of blazing brilliances.
Young families – every single face beaming – jammed as close as they could nudge to the front of the patio area, the better to be within sniffing of the tallest tree in town.
On a cool but entirely pleasant evening beneath a full moon, exactly three weeks before Christmas Day, traditional Christmas songs – some debuted in the 1940s and ‘50s, others even earlier – blared happily, not at all intrusively, over a loud speaker system.
Not a single element of Christmases of yore was missing.
Not a single face failed to fold into an enveloping smile.
From 5 o’clock when the family crowd began collecting, until shortly after 6:45 when they reluctantly started filing toward the numerous inviting eateries that surround Downtown, it was yesterday again — for as far as the eye could see, as distantly as the heart could wish.
