Dyker Heights, Brooklyn residents are famous for their Christmas lighting spectacles. [see Dyker Lights: Delights or Blights] Every year, for at least the past 50 or 60 years, they’ve become increasingly adept (if sometimes rather kitsch) at managing dazzlingly brilliant Yuletide displays that have become the pride and joy of that neighborhood and the talk and envy of adjoining neighborhoods. Spectators come from the four corners of New York City (some would be bold enough to say the “four corners of the world”), to gaze on this holiday splendor. Within an approximate half mile periphery, hordes of adoring crowds and caravans of agonizing traffic jams could be seen lining the streets of Bay Ridge in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
Of course, Dyker Heights is only the most famed microcosm for the scattered macrocosm of single houses and entire blocks and neighborhoods throughout NYC that have gained growing and glowing admiration for celebrating Christmas as though it was going out of style for over half a century. However, most Brooklyn churches have been slow in doing likewise and getting in on the action. Understandably, the clergy’s celebration of Christmas was more concerned with the solemn rather than the festal nature of the holiday; the glittering baubles, bangles and beads of jingle bell observances devoted instead to the worship of Jesus Christ’s Nativity.
In 1995, perhaps finally realizing (again, they were slow) that Christmas had become and would remain more a secular than a religious event, the first “Celebration of Light” was held in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (by the way, a district which borders Dyker Heights) not in a church but in a convent/ school.
A fairly new Christmas tradition throughout southwest Brooklyn all began with hope and help from friends here in Bay Ridge in 1995. It was then that business, city and healthcare leaders came to an historic cloistered Bay Ridge convent and school to launch the first “Celebration of Light” to keep the Christmas spirit aglow….
In a combined effort to boost religious institutions and the faith that sustains them, the first Christmas display, a full-sized manger with life-sized figures of shepherds, animals and magi, would be placed on the huge front lawn outside the convent and its school. Freely providing the display was the Long and DeLosa Construction firm.
In the fifteen years since that first “Celebration,” at least 26 churches in southwest Brooklyn have followed suit and are now festively illuminated for the Christmas season. The Church and its offspring denominations constantly endeavoring to keep up with the secular refinements of a holiday it introduced over 1500 years ago.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=cf7ba750-6a33-4078-8922-3fd864250329)
Sphere: Related Content
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
