Twinkling lights, inflated Santas and ginormous candy canes. Mary, Joseph, Jesus and Frosty the Snowman all inhabiting the same yard. My Lake Highlands neighborhood, Woodbridge, is a veritable Peaceable Kingdom of holiday characters backlit by thousands of shining bulbs.
One of my neighbors, attorney Chris Attig recently floated an idea to get even more participation — maybe even from Scrooges like me who have zero lights, save the front porch.
Earlier this month he posted a note on our neighborhood association Facebook page promising to donate $2, via his biz Attig Law Firm, to the Down Syndrome Guild of Dallas for every house in Woodbridge that has Christmas lights up by midnight Dec. 23. He also promises $2 for every decorated street sign.
He has in the past experimented with giving donations for each Facebook/AttigLawFirm “like”. He figured if the charity incentive could motivate people to participate in social media, maybe it could get them to participate in Christmas.
Attig, like the rest of us, enjoys Christmas lights, but he says his reasons for this rally run deeper. Woodbridge is located in close proximity to some of Dallas’s more crime-ridden apartment complexes. Attig says holiday celebrations bring people and communities together and start building traditions.
“One of the reasons I think that crime has taken root here,” he says, “is that the people in the various communities—homeowners, apartment communities—don’t work together to keep the criminal element out. We don’t work together because we don’t know each other. We don’t know each other because we let economic, cultural, and social differences come between us.”
Attig says he and his wife have noticed that children from neighboring apartments come to trick-o-treat en masse when homes are decorated. I’ll note here that a few homeowners in Woodbridge didn’t think that was such a good thing, but Attig says encouraging this type of interaction builds connections across socioeconomic lines and has the potential to curb crime.
He knows it’s not the answer to all of our crime problems, but, he suggests, a Christmas light show could bring people together. “If so, would that help to bring us all a little closer and make us more willing to join forces for the big fight against the criminal element at Forest-Audelia? I don’t know, but if it works, my firm may try to do something a little bigger next year.”
Of course, you don’t have to live in my neighborhood to get in the Christmas spirit and light up your property, or to donate to the Down Syndrome Guild, which you can read more about here.
