Is it just our impression or are there really much more Christmas lights shining out from so many homes?

There was a Xarabank programme on the many Christmas lights which also showed entire houses decorated with Christmas lights and so on and so forth.

There were also as usual, media comments that seem to portray anything that Xarabank focuses on as naff, kitsch, ‘only in Malta’ exaggerations.

In fact, as any even slight knowledge of films, and foreign magazines would show, this is not an exclusively Maltese trait. On the contrary it is to be found in many American villages and also in Europe and in Britain.

But the for-and-against armies have all missed out one important fact that is staring us in the face. Last year there were far less lights around.

Last year we were all in energy rates increase shock. People had heard about the surcharge going up, the conflicts on all sides on what the real price of electricity should be. The issue had come suddenly upon the population, as it was not really a budget issue, so it was sprung almost by stealth. Then, after a summer and autumn lull on the budget (definitely not something we were used to), the social partners found themselves in a huge row with the government.

This sort of conflict was not new to the Maltese shores. Much the same thing, perhaps worse, had happened the year before, and this was characterised first by Minister Austin Gatt’s obdurate resistance against any change from the prices involved until then the Prime Minister had to intervene and quieten things up.

This time last year, people still did not know the rates at which they would be charged. They still had long months to find out as ARMS took so long to be set up that people began receiving six-month bills at one go. But now, it would seem, people have got used to the electricity bills. Hence the additional Christmas lights.

Some people love to have them, some people loathe them. Those who love them simply love going to town on them. They hang up lights on the front garden trees, decorate every window, have big Santas at the front door, or have him climbing up the balcony.

It is not that people have gone mad or have forgotten the cost of electricity. It is just that in these households the benefit of lighting up the whole neighbourhood and establish the house as a Christmas house has far outweighed the disadvantages of paying more and more when the next bills come.

People are still careful with their electricity, they still switch off any useless lighting, and still remember (and make their children remember) to switch off the light once one moves from a room to another. People still invest in energy saving lamps and in solar heaters that cut the heating cost in the house.

And yet, confounding the naysayers and the prophets of doom and gloom, they have turned the streets into avenues of twinkling lights.

We are not speaking here of the gaily-coloured streets lit up by the local councils (some did, some did not) or the associations of outlet owners. Nor of the gaily-coloured shops with loud music to try and entice people to spend, spend, spend.

That is the commercial aspect of Christmas which ill-accords with the real spirit of the season, and which has turned the feast of Christ’s birth into one big extravaganza of buying.

This is something else: simple people, simple households rejoicing in the potency of the multi-coloured lights to do away with the gloom and darkness of winter nights.

Believers or not, these people simply love lights and want others around them to rejoice at the multicoloured lights. Apart from any religious connotations, there is something primeval and psychological in the beneficial influence of small coloured lights in the dark nights.