States' Lights and Christmas Rites

It comes stealing up on us first in the wide eyes of very young children, who see Christmas shining a long way off. Older brothers and sisters are more nonchalant; they can be downright businesslike about it. A camera would be O.K., but how about a snowmobile? As the day approaches, the spirit settles over them, too, like fresh snow on a busy town. Parents come round last, rushing from toy stores to cocktail parties, muttering about the cost of evergreen trees, chilled by the cold glare of Christmas bills to come. By Christmas Eve, though, everybody is a willing conspirator.

All across America, the same stirring. But it shows itself in different ways. In the capitals of the 50 states, those differences are delineated in lights. This Christmas the capitals have become beacons bearing witness to individual state character.

In Santa Fe, N. Mex., government buildings, businesses and houses are trimmed with farolitos, votive candles burning on a bed of sand in small paper bags, that offer a warming gleam against the dark. Olympia, Wash., launched a gaudy annual contraption called Christmas Island, assembled from Army pontoon bridges and anchored offshore with a forest of lights and a life-size Nativity scene. Denver's stately City and County Building is a blinking, electrified gingerbread house as multicolored as a jukebox. Not to be outdone, Austin sports a 165-ft.-tall, man-made metal tree shining out over a Santa's Village of shops in a turn-of-the-century setting. Atlanta's capitol holds its own 31-ft. Eastern red cedar, bedecked with red ribbons and 2,000 white yarn snowflakes painstakingly crocheted by the state's senior citizens. Boston's golden-domed statehouse backs a Common of white-lit trees. In Sacramento this year, because the capitol building is undergoing reconstruction to strengthen it against earthquakes, only two 10-ft. firs herald the holiday. And in Washington, a white spruce festooned with 2,500 colored lights and 5,000 shiny ornaments easily upstages the Capitol behind it. But over near the White House the nation's official Christmas tree is dark except for one star at the top because the hostages in Iran have yet to receive a Christmas gift of freedom from the unwise men in the East. qed

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