We intellectual elitists who pull our pants on differently than the masses know that good art and culture encounters do much more than “entertain.” They give us an enhanced understanding of ourselves and our world. This truism undergirds my explorations of arts and culture in the Richmond region and my writings about them in this blog.

With this in mind I experienced a 12/19/2011 three-hour tour of a familiar art form: tacky Christmas lights. (The tour also included an indoor visit to the Jefferson Hotel with its huge tree and its Gingerbread House composed of 700 pounds of gingerbread bark and shingles, 500 cherry sours, 600 fruit gumdrop slices, 300 pounds of royal icing, and other ingredients.) From where I sat (in the back of a limo), the Richmond region’s tacky lights appeared to be “mere” entertainment and absent of any sort of poignant look at ourselves or our world.

But the paradigm changed for me at the Phifer residence – that ultimate of tacky lights houses, and a house that’s been doing it now for 37 years. There was limo-to-minivan congestion, orange traffic cones protecting the pedestrians who had parked and walked in, and of course a zillion lighted lights and figurines and trees and signs and all sorts of stuff. Plus, this was all in a cul-de-sac, and vehicular traffic – like us – had to be careful of other vehicles all making nighttime u-turns to exit the sac. We did this successfully and then parked a couple of blocks away and walked back in to get a longer and fuller effect.

There were lots of people of lots of ages representing lots of slices of life. I decided to spend a few minutes listening and observing, and all I saw and heard was a constant theme: happiness.

I looked for the cliché parent-child confrontation, the cliché husband/wife disagreement, the cliché driver-to-driver rage, and for other signs of non-happiness. But I didn’t see them. There were smiles, laughter, wide eyes, awed expressions, and jumping and skipping. Just watching those vehicles, one after the other, doing their back-up-and-go-forward u-turns in that congested cul-de-sac was a miracle in itself. Even the oversized van with “Our Lady of Hope Health Center” written on the side negotiated the turn.

A plausible explanation for this mass happiness was the lights and their context.  Did they – like the best forms of art - cause me to gain a better understanding of myself and my world? Yep.