France and Spain: A Celebration of Love and Lights

I’ll confess that I haven’t always been a great fan of Christmas.

Growing up Jewish, I mostly remember waiting for the whole thing to be over. While my friends were outside riding shiny new bicycles around the neighborhood, I was inside with my Hanukkah chocolate, perhaps a dreidel nearby, wondering how eight nights of modest gifts had somehow failed to compete with the spectacle unfolding across the street.

I may be exaggerating slightly. But not by much. 😊

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At the time, Christmas seemed like one enormous celebration to which I had somehow received the wrong invitation. Fortunately, I’ve long since outgrown those childhood feelings. And while traveling through France and Spain during the holiday season, I found myself not only enjoying Christmas, but being genuinely moved by it.

Europe knows how to put on a holiday celebration.

Carla and I were fortunate enough to see cities beginning their Christmas season in several places, and each had its own personality. Montpellier was probably the most spectacular. Large-scale light shows were projected onto the facades of public buildings, accompanied by music, transforming the architecture into enormous moving canvases of color and imagination. Crowds filled the streets and plazas, and for a while the entire city seemed to become part of the performance.

We also experienced the Christmas lights in Málaga and wandered through holiday markets in Montpellier and Aix-en-Provence, where local artisans sold handmade crafts, food, decorations, and all the things that apparently become much harder to resist when surrounded by twinkling lights and the smell of something wonderful cooking nearby.

But what stayed with me wasn’t really the lights or the markets themselves.

It was the people. Families were out together. Friends met in the squares. Children stared at the displays with that expression children have when something has completely captured their imagination. People lingered. They laughed. They ate. They stood shoulder to shoulder watching the same lights dance across an old building.

For a few hours, the city felt less like a collection of individuals and more like a community. And I loved that.

Standing in Montpellier watching one of those magnificent light shows, I found myself thinking about how easily this season can become consumed by buying. Somewhere along the way, Christmas has developed a rather complicated relationship with shopping carts, credit cards, shipping deadlines, and the annual question of what on earth to buy someone who already has everything they need.

Yet there we were, surrounded by thousands of people enjoying something that required very little from any of us.

Just show up. Look. Be amazed. Share the moment with whoever happens to be standing beside you. That felt much closer to the spirit of the season than anything I could imagine finding inside a shopping mall.

Maybe that’s what celebrations are supposed to do. They interrupt our ordinary routines long enough to remind us that joy matters. Beauty matters. Being together matters. And bringing a little delight into someone else’s life is not an insignificant thing.

Montpellier, Málaga, and Aix-en-Provence did that beautifully. The celebrations were grand, certainly, but I don’t think the lesson requires illuminated buildings or entire streets filled with Christmas markets. The same spirit can exist around a small dinner table with a few people we love. It can happen over coffee, during a phone call, while sharing a meal, giving someone our attention, or simply being a little kinder than the day requires.

That seems like a pretty good holiday tradition regardless of what we celebrate.

I still approach Christmas from outside its religious tradition, but I’ve come to appreciate something universal in the best of it: the invitation to gather, to give, to wonder, and to remember one another.

And perhaps that’s why those evenings in France and Spain affected me as much as they did. They reminded me that the real magic of a celebration isn’t necessarily in the lights. It’s in what the lights illuminate.

People coming together. Children feeling wonder. Strangers sharing a moment.

Family and friends making time for one another.

So wherever and however you celebrate this season, my hope is simply that there is some joy around your table, some kindness in your conversations, and a little extra love being passed around.

The world can certainly use all three.