Drawn in to the season, in spite of myself

Each year, along

about now, everyone else’s life starts to look a lot more appealing than my own. The whole world seems to belong to a secret society whose motto is, “Aren’t We All So Happy and Well-Adjusted and Aren’t You Not!”

Everyone’s life, in other words, looks like a Norman Rockwell painting, beautifully framed -- except my own, which seems to bear more resemblance to a densely skewed Jackson Pollock drawing on see-through paper, hung up with a thumbtack.

Every single member of the secret society sends out season’s greetings cards right on time -- and orders gifts way ahead of time -- while I’m still making my list and checking it twice. And usually sending out extravagantly wrought excuses after New Year’s. Every single member is singing gentle carols while I’m hissing, “Bah, humbug!”

That’s because the holidays set off opposing emotional forces in me, those loud, dueling banjos of love ‘em-loathe ‘em twangs resounding in my head.

I was in my very early teens when my mother died three weeks before Christmas, and for years I avoided the whole month of December. Sometimes I’d leave wherever I was and fly off to a place less familiar, where I would try not to think about it: Dublin, London, Mexico, Barbados. That never really worked except in the most superficial way, but eventually, December became almost OK again. Even today, it’s only almost OK.

Still, in spite of myself, and no matter how intense the pull between avoidance and embracing, I end up with a collection of bafflingly snug holiday memories. So much of that has to do with the anonymous generosity of strangers -- all those people who get with the program and put fresh green wreaths on their doors, metal reindeer in their yards and blinking trees in their front windows that give all the appearance of inviting one to come on in and sit by the fire.

I’ve rarely managed to pull off the big-scale tree and ornaments production, but I usually manage something by way of a feeble or wacky tribute to the spirit of things.

Last year, I got a 3-foot potted evergreen from Trader Joe’s, and not being particularly inspired to search for Lilliputian bulbs, I used costume jewelry. I had a whole box full of largish earrings, the kind of absurdities that Texas wives wore in the mid-1980s (also the kind you look at after the fashion has passed, if ever it truly existed, and wonder what possessed you).

I attached all the danglies to my miniature branches, put a pearl and crystal clip-on at the peak for my star, and thought it could hold its own in Rockefeller Center. Now I was on a roll. On the front door, I hung a little glass-fruit estate-sale wreath meant for the indoors that shimmered golden in the light, and I worried, but only overnight, that it would be quietly removed by someone who thought it was as lovely I did.

But I do best at being America’s guest. That is to say, being treated to the secondhand thrill of enjoying what the more committed members of the universal secret society have provided -- all those glorious, stupendously mood-changing light shows in every neighborhood, grand or modest. It’s then, as soon as the town is aglow with them, that I don’t mind that everyone else has Ozzie and Harriet for parents and Beaver Cleaver for a friend. Because, without fully realizing it, they’ve included me in the action.

Lights at Christmas are always more about decorating for other people than for yourself, a stage-strutting in front of the public, but in the most acceptably egoistic way possible. One can have all the visual pleasure without suffering any of the work. Show off all you want, I say.

There is scarcely a more joyful pursuit than a slow drive up and down city streets come mid-December, when everyone who’s going to has strung up bright, oversized stars that stretch from one sidewalk to the other, wrapped the trunks of palms in diagonal strips of white lights or entirely covered their bungalows in multi-colored ones.

It reminds me of the long Sunday drives that my family, all seven of us, used to take in the Deep South, when, in a leisurely way, I got to know what the neighborhoods of my small town looked like, the facades of houses, the cars in driveways, the dogs behind fences.

We never missed the Christmas drive, of course. There were no extravaganzas to compare with those of L.A., but lights are lights, and, big or small, wild or tame, tacky or tasteful, they are, for my money, the best thing going at Christmas. They lift me up and put me in mind of what it’s all about.

This year, I think I’ll get a jump on things. I won’t wait to go light-cruising to feel fine about the season. I’ll light every candle I have, every night. And maybe I’ll drape a strand of magnolia lights across my bureau as if it were a mantel, and remember those family drives of my Southern childhood, and all the good seasons I have lived through, whatever my losses, and however lopsided my vision.

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Barbara King is editor of the Home section. She can be reached at barbara.king@latimes.com