JOY ALONG THE WAY: EXPLAINING CHRISTMAS LIGHTS TO ET

1994 reaches for maturity. The trees have gone bald. Some of their twigs have fallen off in the restless wind. One searches for color in the landscape. A few rose hips add little red freckles here and there in the hedgerow. Small blue seeds decorate the old cedars. The silver of the fuzzed goldenrod needs a cardinal or blue jay to alight on it. The oaks appear to be giant whisk brooms sweeping the gray skies as if to bring out the sun and stars. Ere long the white blanket will come soft as a benediction and the year will sleep.

I walk up and down my fencerow looking for signs of life. A mole's upheaved summer track has sunk in, making a miniature river when it rains. The mole has gone deeper. So has the woodchuck. No grasshoppers jump ahead of me. No turtles, no Old Stripe.

Deprived of nature's recent spectacular color, mankind makes his own, not just for color, though, but to celebrate a One Time Only Event.

Millions of blinking red, green, blue and gold lights twinkle all over. Should space ships draw near, their occupants might surmise that Planet Earth has broken out in some kind of wintertime rash and would quickly depart lest they catch it. Not that they wouldn't be welcome if they came in peace.

I'd love to take the space people around and explain to them the "break out" of lights, assuming, of course, that they spoke my language.

In deep-thought moments I have wondered how one would go about explaining the Christmas story to someone, say a space alien, who had no earthly background, or for that matter an Earth person who had never heard it. Could there still be some?

Assuming the ETs had eyes to see as we see, I think I might try to depict it in drawings. They would have seen stars I assume and the constellations such as Orion, The Southern Cross, Big Dipper, the sun and moon, although perhaps from a different angle. Thus they would recognize the stars to be the skies. And perhaps they would recognize as humans the simplistic stick drawings that children make of mama, papa, brother and sister. Who could miss the straight-line body, with straight-line arms and legs attached at proper places and a round head on top to be humans who walk below the sun, moon and stars?

I would have two-tier drawings of these things. The top tier would be a strip of stars, including some constellations which they might have seen from our angle. They would surely recognize it as the skies.

Beneath these skies I would have a bunch of stick people, marching along, heads hanging down, bent backs, broken legs, any way I could think of to picture dejection, helplessness and hopelessness. Midway of the upper sky tier I'd have a huge star appearing in the sky, with radiant beams shining on a little stick baby in a crib. After the appearance of this big star, I'd resume the skies as usual, but the stick people underneath would be straightened up, heads up, shoulders back, some arms uplifted, depicting that something had happened to humanity after that Big Star with the earth baby beneath. Would they wonder? Would they get the picture? Would they laugh and dance as if they knew exactly what we were trying to explain? As if they'd had the same experience?

Would the space people go away but keep returning at this season of the year to see if the "rash of lights" was still twinkling? Or had we gradually gone dark, light by twinkling light?

Such thoughts make me want to turn on every light in the house, light every candle, lamp and lantern to show all who might be watching that the "light" brought by that star still burns brightly and steadily in remembrance, year after year, after year, 1994 no exception.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.