On Christmas Eve, I was riding an e-bike with joyful abandon alongside people I love. It was nighttime, and the weather was in the 70s. Perfection. We rode through a neighborhood to see Christmas lights, and they did not disappoint. These homes have beautiful patios and exquisite lawns. At one point, we circled a large roundabout again and again. In the center, trees with sprawling branches were wrapped in countless white Christmas lights.
I felt elated. I looked up and saw a macaroni moon — a sliver in the sky. I heard kids laughing, shouting that they had won races of their own making. “Core memory!” I yelled, recognizing in real time that I was creating one of my favorite Christmas memories.
We kept biking through the neighborhood, marveling at the lights everywhere. But then a different question surfaced, and once I thought it, I already knew the answer.
Who hung these lights?
I’ve been here before. I’ve walked and biked through this neighborhood and noticed how many Hispanic people work in the yards. It’s likely that some of the same people who care for these lawns also strung the lights I was enjoying in every direction.
Some are likely citizens. Some probably are not. Still, they are residents of this beautiful city I’m visiting.
And what is their experience on Christmas Eve?
I imagine it’s varied. Some immigrants, children of immigrants, and grandchildren of immigrants are laying down their own core memories. But some have loved ones in detention. Some live with the constant fear of family separation. Some exist in a kind of functional lockdown. Many are always looking over their shoulders.
That very Christmas Eve, when I returned home, I saw a news article that stopped me cold. The current administration is making plans to build or repurpose seven to eight warehouses — actual warehouses, a word they themselves are using — to hold nearly 80,000 immigrants. All of this in service of creating a deportation machine. It is wildly dehumanizing. It is dangerous. It is traumatic. It is a public health crisis.
This Christmas, we are living very different experiences. We are moving through the world from different social locations. And if the season means anything at all, perhaps it is this: that joy and beauty invite us not into forgetting, but into seeing more clearly — and choosing care, dignity, and human rights for all our neighbors.
Smuggling Grace 