Stopping By a Yard

Following Christmas dinner with aunt Evelyn, cousin Raina, and her husband Jesse, we were treated to a drive around some spots in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

With apologies to Robert Frost, I would like to talk about our experience after finding the display of one homeowner. One other visitor mentioned to me that the owner has been putting up this display for 31 years and that it takes two months set up the display.

Whose lights these are I do not know,
Their house is in the city, though.
They will not mind us stopping here
To watch their yard lights all aglow.

Dear neighbors must think it queer
That all us folks have no house near.
Around the corner and down the street--
The busiest evening of the year.

We miss those silver bells that shake,
The carolers singing: “shepherds quake…”
The “hunch,” the crunch, the shivering sounds
From blizzard winds with many a flake.

The lights are lovely--high and deep--
But we have promises to keep,
And miles to go before we sleep,
And miles to go before we sleep.

Had conditions been a bit different--a horse-drawn carriage ride through the snowy countryside--I could have entered Frost's 1922 poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

But the elaborate display provided several minutes of viewing--and it began to feel colder, and I thought I felt a few snowflakes before we left.