Asleep Before the Drive Home

December dark starts before four up here. The cold comes to the glass in two stages, fog at the corners first and then all the way across. The air at the back door has that sharp December cut to it, the smell of frost and cut pine and somebody's chimney smoke. It is the first real cold of the year, the kind that has just begun to work down into the ground, nothing like November's wet or January's dead still. The car windshield wears a skim of ice that turns the streetlights into stars before the engine is even started.

Supper is early this month, because the dark is the point of the evening, and the dark comes early. We eat, we clear, and then my father's old words come out of my mouth in my own voice: let's go see the lights. My sister and I used to run for the front closet before he could finish the sentence. My daughter and son do the same, except that there is always a fight about coats, somebody is always missing a mitten, and the whole production takes twenty minutes and is the best part of the week.

Pajamas and Coats

Pajamas first, and the rule is the whole trick of the evening. We leave in what we will sleep in, coats and snowsuits on top, so that when we come home the children can go straight to bed without a single argument — that is the theory, anyway. Maggie is five and has opinions about which pajamas are for driving. Theo is three and will wear anything except the red penguin set, which is Maggie's, and which he wants because it is Maggie's.

I make the cocoa in the big pot, whole milk and a spoon of sugar, the way my mother made it, and pour it into the metal thermos she used, the one that keeps heat better than any of the new ones. The cup screws onto the lid and is exactly the right size for a five-year-old's two hands. The cocoa has to be hot enough to hurt a little, which was my mother's rule, and it still is.

Dan carries the thermos out to the car while I settle the mitten dispute. The window seat is settled the way it was settled in my parents' car: the younger one takes the window behind the driver, and the older one complains. By the time the engine is warm, they have moved on to asking if we are there yet, which we are not.

The Ordinary Streets

The first part of the drive is the ordinary streets, and the ordinary streets are half the pleasure. On our street, maybe three houses have lights at all; the rest hang wreaths or nothing, and the kids count the dark houses like a score. The first lit house is the one with the wooden star in the window, and Dan slows to a near-stop for it while Maggie announces it like news. Theo has already lost interest and is looking backward at our own porch light receding. The next street over is better, and the next better than that, so that the whole thing builds like the run-up to something.

The car carries a particular December smell, wool coats out of storage and the clean cold that comes in whenever a door opens. My father drove this stretch one-handed and slow, the way Dan does now, because the anticipation is part of the evening too.

The radio is playing the same songs it played in my parents' car, and nobody changes it. By the time we reach the road out past the edge of town, the kids have lost count of the dark houses, which is the point of the count. The road opens onto a bare field, asleep since the harvest, and the cold comes in through the half-open window with the smell of frost. It is fully dark and fully December. Then we turn, and the lights begin.

The Competing Street

The street is a long slow bend of houses, and every house on it competes with the one across the way. It is not a contest anyone wins, but it is a contest. The house on the left runs its lights to music you can hear with the window down, the same tinny song every year. The house across from it has a hand-painted plywood sleigh and a Santa who has faded the same amount every December I have been alive. The far house has a blow-up snowman bigger than its garage.

The house with the reindeer has the animal's head on a small motor, so it turns as the cars pass. The blue house is strung with icicle lights along every roofline, and its windows are lit like the inside of a snow globe.

The best of them is the corner house, and we save it for last, the way my parents did, and the way the cars ahead of us are doing too — you can tell by how they slow almost to a stop in front of it. The cars move in a slow line, and the cold comes through every open inch of window, along with the tinny music and somebody's wood smoke.

Maggie hands down verdicts from the back seat: the reindeer house, the star house, the blue house that looks like a snow globe. Theo agrees with everything when he is paying attention. Dan and I vote for the hand-painted sleigh, which was already there when I was Maggie's age, and which is the whole argument, as far as I'm concerned.

The Year the Best House Went Dark

One December, my sister Rachel was home for the holidays, the first time in years, and she came along. Rachel grew up in the back seat of these same drives, and she has opinions. We saved the corner house for last, as always, and Rachel saw it first. "The corner house is dark," she said.

In the back seat, Rachel and I used to argue about the second-best house, because the best one was not up for debate. The corner house didn't count.

It was. A porch light burned over the door, and a car sat in the driveway, and nothing else on the house was lit. The woman who lived there, who had made that corner the best on the street for as long as I had been coming, was not lighting it this year.

The kids asked why that house was off. I said I didn't know. Rachel said, "Remember how we thought that house was a whole other country?" And I did remember, and then the car moved on, and the next house filled the windshield with red and blue and gold.

Asleep Before the Drive Home

The cocoa comes out somewhere in the middle of the street of lights and is finished by the time we turn for home. I pour into the cup that screws onto the lid, and we pass it forward and back until it is empty. Maggie holds it with two hands and drinks like it is her job. Theo gets the last warm swallows. By the time the street of lights fades in the mirror, Theo is asleep, head against the window, snowsuit hood up.

Maggie lasts a little longer, and then she is asleep too, somewhere past the bare field. The back windows are fogged with the breath of the children, and Dan turns the radio down until it is barely there. Rachel and I talk about nothing, or watch the road, which amounts to the same thing. The drive home is the quiet version of the drive out. Our porch light is on for us, and Dan carries Theo in with the snowsuit still on, and Theo does not wake.

Maggie walks from the car to the door with one hand on the wall, and I unzip her in the front hall. Underneath is the red penguin set, which is the whole trick of the evening and the whole reward. The children are in bed, and the house goes quiet. I stand in the dark kitchen and look out at the street. A neighbor's tree glows red and blue behind their window, and at the end of the street somebody's roof lights are still blinking.

It is late, and it is cold, and there are other cars still out there, still driving slow, still looking.