For years I’ve been telling my friends back East about the Christmas Lights at Temple Square in Salt Lake Citym, Utah. It’s easily the most awesome Christmas display I’ve ever seen – they individual wrap each tree, branch, and twif closely with a gazillion lights. It’s FAR more elaborate and painstaking than any other Christmas display I’ve seen anywhere else. In most places they simply drape a few strings of lights over the trees. This is orders of magnitude more complex and beautiful.
Part of the thrill of seeing it is walking through the square and seeing how one branch eclipses another as you walk along. You can’t capture it in a photo, but even a single photo can give you some feel of the complexity abnd intensity of the show. I had a color newspaper photo I used to show people.
It occurred to me that, now that we have YouTube, I can give people the experience online. So I looked.
I am disappointed. None of the Youtube videos even begins to capture the essence of the experuience. The video-makers seem to love the Dark, not the light. There;'s far too much darkness and not enough of the lights. Most of the videos seem to be looking outside the square, and at anything BUT the lights. Even the still photos aren’t as good as the one from the newspaper. Yet news srtories all agree that the number of lights has been INcreasing over the years.
Here’s one of the few decent shots I’ve found:
http://www.ldsphotogallery.com/main.php?g2_itemId=185
This one’s not Temple Square, but from across the street, on the Church Office block:
http://leggnet.com/2006/12/temple-square-at-night.html
One of the rotten videos:
Another disappointing video: