I’m 24 years old, and I think the holiday light display is a great idea. Growing up, I remembered the holiday season (Christmas for my family) as being a time of communal gatherings and being thankful for all we have. Whether it was gathering canned goods at school for the Downtown Mission or buying gifts for less fortunate families, it was always sure to bring out everyone’s giving spirit.

It really dawned on me recently, after graduating and working full-time, that most people just go through the same cycles of work, pay taxes, eat, sleep and repeat. We move on from the schools that taught us to give to the less fortunate whatever we can do without, to the working world where it’s all about my paycheck. We forget that were a part of a community that’s striving to help one another. Those people we yell at in traffic, co-workers who make us exhausted, those are same people who we’ll greet with a smile when we go to Jackson Park to see the lights.

I want my peers to feel the same sense of community we were raised with as children, and provide that to the next generation ahead of us. Although the holiday light display in Jackson Park won’t directly feed any mouths, it’s feeding our deep desire to feel like a community again.

I want to thank our municipality for reinvigorating the sense of holiday giving within myself and hopefully the rest of my community. The lights strung together shining as one, decorating the landscape, that’s in a sense what we are too, as individuals we’re shining lights capable of brightening the darkness, held together by our sense of community and making our home, Windsor, beautiful.

Ramsin Ishaq, Windsor

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