A Christmas Eve when the stars came out in color

It was early evening of Christmas Eve 1954, my mother told me to come outside to look at something. Standing on our front porch in Rock Island, IL it was unusually warm and I took off my jacket. As I looked around, I saw most of our neighbors also standing outside, in their shirt sleeves, looking into the sky. The stars were brightly colored! There were red stars, blue stars, and yellow stars. The shown with a brightness that was amazing even to someone two months from turning six. I moved my eyes from one constellation to the next, marveling at the colored stars.

At the time, I thought that this was God’s way of celebrating his Son’s birthday (My parents had not sent me to Hebrew school yet, and I was learning religion from TV shows). After that year, every Christmas Eve night I would check the night sky to see the brightly colored stars again. But every Christmas Eve night from 1955 on the sky was overcast. Eventually I stopped believing the star colors were related to Christ’s birthday, but I kept looking anyway. Finally on Dec 24 1965 the night sky above Rock Island was clear but the stars look like they did on any other winter night. I have check weather records and Dec 24, 1954 was a record high for the region of Illinois I grew up in.

My wife was the first personI knew that had experienced a night when the stars were brightly colored! She saw this on a summer vacation my Lake Michigan. In September 1999 after a Hurricane had taken out the power grid all around Bowie, MD and cleared the sky of all pollution, I saw the star shine with color again. But never have I seen the heavens shine with the glory of that Christmas Eve when I was five year old and believed.