Come December, Lockerbie’s cold winter sky gets incredibly dark after sunset.

That’s one of the first things Melissa Chessher noticed when she and her daughter moved there in the winter of 2001.

It was 13 years after the Pan Am Flight 103 tragedy rattled the small Scottish town, and Christmas spirit was still tough to come by. Chessher noticed some sparse lights strung around town, but nothing like the house in the town over, which had a shockingly bright display that caused local rubberneckers to create traffic jams. She searched high and low for a Christmas tree.

“The disaster was so close to Christmas,” said Chessher, the chair of the magazine journalism department at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “There was no joy to be had. A lot of people took down their trees because they couldn’t celebrate.”

Twenty-five years after a terrorist attack killed 270 people — 35 of them Syracuse University students — aboard that fateful flight, Lockerbie residents will resurrect its Christmas lights with the hopes of bringing back the town’s holiday spirit.

One facet of Chessher’s sabbatical in Lockerbie was writing magazine stories that chronicled how communities heal. Because as dark as the sky gets when the winter sun drops behind the horizon, the memory and burden of self-imposed responsibility for the lives lost in the Pan Am tragedy casts wider, darker shadows.

Abbey Morton is only 24 years old. She’s too young to remember that, for 10 long Decembers, her native Lockerbie kept the town’s Christmas lights off. Her earliest recollection about accepting the tragedy was during its 10th anniversary. She listened to pupils from the Lockerbie Primary School sing Christmas songs. It was the first year they turned on the lights again.

“In the early 2000s, we had lovely lights and great switch-on events. One was Victorian-themed with people dressing in old style clothing and there were carolers from Lockerbie Academy,” said Morton, a staff reporter for the Dumfries Courier, in an email. “A small group of people have worked very hard to make the town festive over the years.”

When the Christmas lights came back on in 1998, Lawrence Mason, a multimedia, photography and design professor at Newhouse, said it was because people in the town thought the children deserved to have a proper Christmas. But because they had fallen into 10 years of disuse, some of the lights needed repair.

“Christmas lights in Scotland are respectful and subdued, at least to American standards,” Mason said.

From Christmas to Christmas, the lights have dimmed, but haven’t gone out. Morton said last year’s display featured a few strings of fairy lights over Lockerbie’s town hall and three Christmas trees stationed across the town. So in early 2013, townsfolk — shopkeepers, locals, the Lockerbie and District Rotary Club — banded together to form a lights committee, and Morton found herself joining the ranks.

The committee didn’t specifically set out to honor the victims of the disaster, but instead chased a simpler dream: bringing Christmas cheer to Lockerbie via new lights. 

Lockerbie’s town center is undergoing a regeneration project, which includes planting decorative trees along the roadside. At Christmastime, those trees will be festooned with strings of lights; nearby lampposts will sport lit motifs.

“We opted to keep it to one color scheme and without a specific theme,” Morton said. “Just classy.”

Lockerbie still carries the weight of 25 years of solemn remembrance, annually wrapping Christmas cheer in sorrow. But Chessher said it’s the small things — like Christmas lights — that allow townspeople to enjoy the spirit of the season.

“It’s comforting to know the town is allowing itself to embrace the joy of the season,” she said. “Allowing themselves some cheer gives them some reprieve from having to be so vigilant.”

The Yuletide spirit of giving arrived months ahead of schedule in Lockerbie this year; the Dumfries and Galloway Council allotted the lights committee a grant to buy this year’s Christmas decorations. With carryover funds from previous committees and community donations, the committee will be able to cover the cost of erecting this year’s display.

And much like the Victorian-themed festivities Morton fondly remembers, the committee plans to have a switch-on event featuring Christmas carolers. There’s more in the works, but Morton said she didn’t want to ruin any surprises.

In the fall semester of 2003 or 2004, Mason took a train to Lockerbie when he was teaching in London to look at the Lockerbie lights.

“You can’t imagine how dark it gets,” Mason said. “On the shortest day of the year, it probably gets dark around three.”

When the temperatures dip, daylight dwindles and nights grow long, Lockerbie will always get dark during nights in the cold heart of winter. But, at least for one Christmas season, Lockerbie’s nights will be a little brighter.

Published on October 7, 2013 at 12:17 am