The Arkansas Capitol is the people’s house, and a house needs decorating for Christmas.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette photographer Stephen B. Thornton’s photos show this year’s bigger-than-ever display.
The lights went on Dec.
7 in spite of a winter storm that put many other festivities on ice.
New is the lighting of the Capitol’s west side, the back, for the 75th state Capitol lighting ceremony earlier this month. Also new, the show is designated a “Southern Travel Treasure” by AAA Southern Traveler magazine.
“Other people have figured out what we who live here already knew,” says David Ware, Capitol historian in the Arkansas secretary of state’s office.
But it wasn’t so many Decembers ago that the building looked more like Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol: “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”
“The tradition of decorating public buildings and government buildings for Christmas does not go back very far,” Ware says.
Some of the holiday’s observances are crackling old as a Yule log. The Christmas tree, for one: Tree decorations go back to the Middle Ages, according to The Everything Christmas Book.
Stores went along with Christmas show windows to encourage shopping. But offices - why decorate a grumpy old office, or a serious-minded place of government business?
President Calvin Coolidge lit the first National Christmas Tree at the White House in 1923. The big tree was a plug for electricity and the makers of electric lights. But people took a shine to it, and Christmas lighting has been a tradition ever since.
Ware tells the twinkle-hearted story of how the state Capitol came to be lighted for the first time in 1938.
C.G. “Crip” Hall was the secretary of state that year, the historian says.
The “C” was for Claris, the “G” was a mystery, and the man went by “Crip.”
“Apparently, he had polio when he was young, and he had a bit of a disability,” Ware says. Also, he had a memory, and a soft spot for children in the hospital at Christmas.
The state Capitol had a Grinchy past. Its construction had been a fight from the 1800s past the turn of the century. Critics had pouted and cried that the building would be fit for nothing but owls and bats (no mention of reindeer), according to the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture.
But Hall wanted Christmas lights - in specific, lights that children could see from the windows of nearby Arkansas Children’s Home and Hospital, today’s Arkansas Children’s Hospital.
Hospitalized children saw the lights that year, Ware says, “and they still do.”
With a Merry Christmas to everybody.
Style, Pages 29 on 12/24/2013