I'm not exactly sure when Owen Sound started this Festival of Northern Lights, but we've been going for years and last night took another drive through the main avenues of the display.

And that's when it struck me ...

Christmas, as we all know, is a time for family and giving and the celebration of the Christ-child and all, but it is also intrinsically a celebration of tradition. Every year, we don't just deck our halls with Holly, we dig out every ornament we have going back as far as we each can in the living scrapbook of our Christmas decorations, a lucky few able to dig out heirloom ornaments, others making do with stuff maybe bought at Zellers but reminiscent of the decorations Grandma used, or Great-Grandma.

After these many years of the Festival of Northern Lights, I'm seeing a new bit of magic acruing in the organic and incremental nature of the displays: Where other towns haul out the same fixed set of downtown decor every year, Owen Sound has decor that grows every year, and that means each new crop of lights, each new season of favourite characters, each new technology in Christmas displays, it all gets woven into a total tapestry that truly tells a story of who we are and who we were if only just a few years ago.

And it's our story too: As we drove by, we see the Teletubbies now all but forgotten in the toy-stores but it brings back those memories of teppatippies in our own house not so long ago, and the Smurf brings back even earlier pre-schoolers trundling about, there's string lights, mini-bulbs and even those old one-inch clunkers that my Dad would patiently test every pre-Christmas season. Hands up those who remember the Year of Those Icicle Lights!

Bravo, Owen Sound, through the Festival of Northern Lights, you've turned a boring plain old any-town tradition of slapping up the same old worn wreaths into the transformation of the entire downtown strip into one massive all-family Christmas Tree!

Paralegal looking for work, any suggestions? Bob

My  family especially liked the dinosaur lights.Cant wait for  next years display.  hey any survivor fans here? Bob

Ok, Home of the Lights may be stretching it a bit, but maybe not: I heard somewhere (probably CFOS morning show) that the Festival of Northern Lights has an unintended claim to a lineage in that Owen Sound was, once upon a time, the home to one of Canada's largest manufacturers of Christmas Lights!.

Anyone know any more about that?