Counting Down in a High-Vis Vest: A Month With the Town's Christmas Lights Crew

On 12 November 2026, the high street is still pretending it is autumn. The plane trees are hanging on to a few stubborn leaves, the card shop has gone full reindeer, and halfway up a ladder outside the estate agent's is a man called Keith, testing a bulb with the expression of a bomb disposal expert.

This is the bit nobody sees. The switch-on itself — the crowd, the countdown, the slightly wonky Santa — takes about twenty minutes. Getting to those twenty minutes takes a year. For the past four weeks I have been sitting in on the meetings, fundraising quizzes and late-night bulb audits of a town's Christmas lights committee, trying to understand how a civic ritual gets made in 2026. The answer, mostly, is high-vis vests and good humour.

The first meeting is mostly stationery

The committee gathers in a side room at the town hall, the sort of room with a flip chart that squeaks and a radiator that clanks like a distant trawler. There are nine people around the table: two councillors, a retired electrician, a florist, a pub landlord, the town centre manager, a woman from the Rotary club, a man who seems to be in charge of extension leads, and me.

I had imagined fairy lights and mulled wine. Instead, there is a spreadsheet. Column A is 'item', Column B is 'who', Column C is 'when', and Column D is 'please, please, please'. The budget is £14,000. The quotes for a decent set of LED festoons have come in at £21,000. Nobody panics. This is clearly a familiar weather system.

The florist suggests a raffle. The pub landlord offers a quiz night. The retired electrician, whose name is Brian and who has the calm of a man who has seen every kind of fuse, says the old bulbs from the 1990s are still in a cage behind the depot and might be salvageable. There is a brief, respectful silence. Then everyone starts talking at once.

Where the money actually comes from

Over the next fortnight I learn that Christmas lights are funded by a patchwork of small miracles. There is a council grant, but it is smaller than you would think and ring-fenced in ways that make buying a forty-metre string of warm-white bulbs feel like a diplomatic incident. There are donations from traders — the butcher gives £250 and asks for nothing, the estate agent gives £500 and asks for a banner. There is a quiz night at the pub which raises £612 and costs the committee three hours of arguing about whether the picture round was too hard.

Then there is the raffle. I spend a Saturday morning selling tickets outside the supermarket, next to a man from the Rotary club who has brought his own table and a flask of tea. We raise £184. A woman wins a hamper and gives it back to be re-raffled. The man from Rotary says this happens every year. 'It's the town,' he says, as if that explains everything. It probably does.

The ladder is the easy part

By the third week, the conversation turns to logistics. This is where the romance of the season meets the unglamorous reality of health and safety. Risk assessments are updated. Method statements are printed. The cherry picker is booked, then unbooked, then booked again when a local firm offers it at cost. There is a long discussion about whether the inflatable snowman counts as a temporary structure. The town centre manager reads out an email from the county council about road closures in a voice usually reserved for reading bedtime stories.

On the Thursday, we do a bulb audit. We lay the old strings out in the church hall and plug them in, one by one. Roughly a third of the bulbs are dead. Brian teaches me how to test them with a little screwdriver-like device and a patience I did not know I possessed. We listen to local radio and drink tea from paper cups. It is oddly lovely. Outside, it is raining sideways.

The celebrity question

Every switch-on needs a guest. In the past, the committee has had a soap actor, a weather presenter and, memorably, a man who used to be in a boy band and now runs a garden centre. This year, the booking is still 'in flux' until the second week of November, when a local radio presenter agrees to do it on the condition that she can bring her dog.

The dog is a hit at the final planning meeting. The presenter is charming and professional. The committee is relieved. But there is a small, unspoken truth in the room: the celebrity is not really the point. The point is the gathering. The celebrity is the excuse.

The night itself

On the evening of the switch-on, the high street is packed. The brass band plays slightly flat. The school choir sings 'Last Christmas' with more enthusiasm than harmony. The pub has set up a stall selling mince pies and mulled wine in paper cups. The vicar says a few words. A child wins a competition to press the button, and for a second the whole street is lit up in a slightly uneven wash of warm white and one rogue blue bulb.

People cheer. Then they drift towards the stalls, the shops, the pub. The lights stay on. The committee stands at the edge of the crowd, holding walkie-talkies and looking tired and pleased. Brian the electrician is already talking about next year's bulb order.

What the glow is for

I had expected the month to be about nostalgia, about some sepia idea of community spirit. It wasn't. It was about email chains and raffle tickets and a borrowed cherry picker. It was about people who care enough to argue over the price of festoons. The lights are not magic. But the fact that a town can still organise itself into a switch-on, in the dark of November, with a budget that doesn't quite stretch — that feels like the real thing worth celebrating.

As I walked home under the new lights, I noticed the estate agent's window had a sign in it: 'Proud sponsor of the town Christmas lights.' The banner was slightly crooked. It had been put up by Keith. It looked perfect.