For Wilshire Baptist Church
Saturday night LeAnn and I enjoyed one of our newest Christmas traditions: Going to the annual Twinkle Tour at Lake Tawakoni State Park. We’ve grown fond of experiencing the lights in the darkness.
In case you don’t know, many of Texas’ state parks invite overnight campers to decorate their campsites, and then on selected nights the public can drive through and view the decorations. Lake Tawakoni State Park is just an hour away, so we decided to check it out three years ago and we keep going back, which in my mind makes it a “tradition.”
For the carload price of just $5 and minimal instructions from the ranger at the front gate — “just follow the loop roads” — we spend 30 minutes amazed and entertained as we drive past the park’s campsites, most of which are decorated. Imagine what you see this time of year on a typical Dallas street but it’s been done outside of campers, travel trailers, pop-ups, lean-tos and tents.
Some campsites are just decorated with strings of lights and some have inflatables bobbing merrily in the night breeze: Santa, Frosty, reindeer and sleighs, Snoopy and Woodstock, the Abominable Snowman and elves. We’ve seen Christmas trees made of lights strung from poles. We’ve seen the infamous leg lamp from “A Christmas Story,” and we’ve seen that movie and others projected onto make-shift screens. We’ve seen nativities too: wire figures outlined in white light and bright plastic characters lit from within.
We see messages of “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays” written in lights strung from sleek Airstreams, boxy Jaycos, and angular Gulf Streams. The rigs run the gamut from giant modern coaches to small pull-behind trailers looking like they’ve traveled many miles from the 1950s to now. The size, shape and age of the camper doesn’t seem to dictate the extravagance of the display. And in the dark, we don’t pay much attention to the rig; we’re there to see the lights.
And we’re there to see the people, too, because at some campsites, the people are part of the display. We’ve seen human Christmas trees and Grinches posing for pictures with folks. Last year we came upon a kid playing Christmas carols on a trumpet. We stopped and rolled down the windows to listen, and when he missed some notes, sputtered and hung his head in frustration, we applauded and cheered him on. LeAnn and I have both been in his shoes.
In the past we’ve been offered cookies at some campsites. This year we stopped where a teen was handing out candy canes, and then the adults with him handed us an invitation to their church’s Christmas Eve carnival and a tract with the words “God is Holy” on the front. They said nothing about it, but we looked at it later. Inside, it explained that “God is perfect,” “we are corrupt,” and “when we die, we must spend eternity in a lake of fire called Hell.” Unless, of course, we “admit . . . believe . . . confess” and take the next step, which is “to find a local church to teach you how to personally know Christ more fully.”
That’s all basically true – but it’s a dark message to be peddling on a festive night when people have come out to see the lights and decorations and to go home feeling warm and lit up on the inside with the joyful spirit of Christmas.
LeAnn and I are drawn to Lake Tawakoni State Park by the promise of beautiful lights in the darkness. I think that’s what Christmas calls us to do: to share the light of God’s love through Christ; to emulate Christ by being a loving, caring light amid the darkness.