Christina’s LIGHTS
‘If a star fell each time we thought of her, the sky would be empty’
‘Ididn’t want to hear about Christmas l i ghts,” says Cindy Paul.
Her daughter Christina had died on April 6, 1993, after being hit by a car on a busy stretch of road near her high school in St. Catharines.
Dinner was waiting on the table when the police knocked on the door to tell Christina’s parents she wouldn’t be coming home. She was 14. “We were having shepherd’s pie,” says her dad Uby. “We haven’t had it since.”
Cindy remembers how quiet the house became without Christina’s bubbling, giggling, great big beautiful laugh in it. Uby couldn’t stand to see the family piano she used to play in the living room, so they gave it away. Months slipped by with Cindy and Uby drifting about in a grieffilled fog, until November arrived.
Christina was born on Nov. 28. But for her, the moment her birthday passed was the beginning of Christmas. Christina loved Christmas, almost as much as she loved to laugh. After mass on Christmas Eve she would have her parents drive around town, winding from street to street, so that she could look at all the Christmas lights.
By age six, she was helping Uby with the display out front of the bungalow on Debora Drive. Christina would untangle the light strings, changing any bulbs that needed to be changed and playing foreman, while Uby struggled away on the ladder, stringing the arrangements to meet the exacting instructions of his daughter.
So Uby had approached his wife, after Christina was gone. He wanted to put up the Christmas lights.
“I think that was the second time in my life that I’ve ever sworn,” Cindy says.
But Uby, a gentle bear of a man from Northern Ontario logging country, who listens more than he speaks, approached her again a few days later — and again after that. He had a plan, he told Cindy, if she would just hear him out.
“What I had in mind was that I would put the lights on for Nov. 28 — for Christina’s birthday — and do it at 4:30 p.m., for the time she died.
“I knew how much Christina loved doing those lights and that if I didn’t keep doing them that she’d get mad at me. So I had to keep going. I had to keep her alive.”
Uby is a millwright, and works with his hands. For the past 22 years he has begun work on “Christina’s lights,” the day after Halloween. He has built a shed alongside the bungalow, to store the decorations. The garage is likewise full. Some of the ornaments are store bought. Some were found at garage sales, although many — including the red angel near the chimney, red being Christina’s favourite colour, and the ladder with Santa on it — are homemade.
Stars, wreaths, a manger, angels, icicles, a snowman, cows ( Christina loved cows) and a fir tree with a speaker tucked inside, piping out Christmas music, make the lawn out front of the bungalow crackle with holiday spirit.
A crowd was gathered out front on Nov. 28, waiting for Uby to hit the switch.
“I have all the lights on timers now,” he says.
“We’ve blown a lot of fuses over the years,” Cindy adds, laughing.
She used to worry that Christina would be forgotten. But even after all these years Christina’s friends still call the house, just to say hello, and send her cards on what would have been her birthday.
Some stop by to see the lights at Debora Drive. They are beacons, attracting neighbours and stran- gers and friends and giving Cindy a chance, when she steps out front to chat awhile, to talk about her daughter. There is an angel near the path leading to the front door. It is tall and willowy and wreathed in white lights.
“That, to me, is Christina’s essence,” Cindy says. “I asked Uby to build me an angel. So he went and built me four.”
The wind starts to bite on what had begun as an unseasonably warm December afternoon. It is time to go back inside. Cindy pauses at a photo- graph of Christina on a wall next to the kitchen. Mother and daughter have the same eyes.
“Missing Christina is like the sky — it covers everything,” Cindy says. “If a star fell each time we thought of her, the sky would be empty.”
But for Christmas, the sky over Debora Drive is full, illuminated by thousands of tiny bulbs, winking red and green and blue and white light.
“I’ve never thought of them as Christmas lights,” Uby says. “They will always be Christina’s lights.”