Rochester. Those who live there refer to it as the “God’s Country” of Tri-Town for its natural beauty, wildlife, rural charm, and bucolic backdrop of everyday simple life.
When the holiday season comes to Rochester, you can feel it in the air. You can see it in the winter constellations that spread across the unencumbered cosmos above the wide-open spaces of farms, fields, ponds, and cranberry bogs. You can find it in the illumination of the usually dark and dimly-lit back roads with houses aglow with holiday lights, some of them elaborate enough to draw higher-than-usual crowds to some quiet corner neighborhoods of town.
This being my fourth Christmas covering the Tri-Town area for The Wanderer, I have become acquainted with each town’s annual traditions that townspeople return to every year, and I have come to appreciate the modest merriment of the Rochester tree lighting. Near the steps of Town Hall, the simple strand of white lights wraps around the evergreen tree that, like ourselves, grows and ages year after year with us barely noticing at all. The star on top compels us to look up and catch a glimpse of the bright crescent “Cold Moon” of December and the guiding light of Venus, second in brightness only to the moon, and looking up at the sky activates the wonder of what it is to be alive and the all too transient feeling of how small we really are and how insignificant it is to buy gifts of things that no one truly needs with money that we do not have.
I imagine the tree, like all of us admiring it, is a joyful witness to crowds that gather beneath it, the children of Rochester Memorial School singing the songs of the season with innocent voices and smiles captured on iPhones pointed at them by proud parents smiling back. The tree then merrily watches the grand arrival of Santa upon the Rochester Fire Department’s ladder truck, its flashing lights piercing the night and exciting the children with the hopes of a candy cane and a high-five from Santa.
I imagine the stilling of the night after the crowd has gone home and the tree spends its first silent night with boughs only slightly burdened by the weight of the lights, which the tree doesn’t seem to mind at all as long as the people notice them as they go about their Christmas around it.
I imagine the tree is happy as it remains a constant year after year, night after night, into the New Year before the lights are taken down and the tree dissolves back into the simple scenery of the quiet town center, the way people prefer it around there.
So, while the rest of the region is bustling from store to store, annoyed in holiday traffic and stressing out about how little time is left to prepare for the big day, there stands the simple, unostentatious Christmas tree in the center of Rochester – a symbol of how, just maybe, the holidays could use a little more Rochester.
By Jean Perry
