Here's one that hasn't been plugged in since the 1970s. Its filament is cold and clear white, like the sub-zero Michigan winter of 1974.

I was unemployed that year, bouncing from one crummy brick-toting, gas-pumping, ditch-digging job to the next. I was a college dropout with a low sticker price and a future that came with an "As Is'' warranty - sort of like the 1960 "Transportation Special'' I drove. But that Chevy never failed to start that winter, even when new cars froze up in the 20-below nights and groaned like old men who refused to get out of bed in the morning.

I was living with a bunch of hippies in a farmhouse that was crowded with stereos, vast record collections, Zig-Zag posters, waterbeds and insolent cats - but we were too cool to put up any bourgeois Christmas decorations. So the tree I remember that year was the one at my sister's apartment on Daft Street.

I went there often to get a break from the cats and the background noise of tortured electric guitars, and get a little closer to a refrigerator that had actual food in it, not things that looked like ant farms for bacteria.

And there was that tree. It was pretty sad. Every time we walked by or shut a door, it would quiver and shower the floor with needles like confetti in a tickertape parade for Old Man Winter. Within a few days it looked as bare and empty as my bleak future.

We laughed and made jokes about our Charlie Brown tree. But we put a few little presents under it.

And as Christmas approached, it began to assume a stark and simple beauty. Each time we vacuumed up the fresh layer of fallen needles, the little apartment would be filled with the fresh scent of evergreen Christmas.

We were poor. We didn't have much. But we had each other, and I was hopelessly in love with a young nursing student who wound up marrying a totally different guy who finished college and got a pretty good job in the newspaper business - me.

Love made all the difference.

Maybe it just seems that way from the blurry airbrushed distance of years, but being poor was not so bad. It gave meaning to our gifts to each other, the way the emptiness of white snow intensifies the colors of Christmas lights on a tree in the yard.

And being money poor is as at least 20-below obvious. It hits you in the face every time you step out the door. It's not invisible, like the spiritual poverty that can hide under piled-up presents of abundance.

What worries me is not the occasional dim or unlit bulb on the string of Christmas memories. It's the empty sockets of Christmases that were not even remembered, because they were never plugged in to the electric current of our hearts.

If we just go through emotionless motions and check off the list of the presents we order from each other, we miss it all. The real spirit of Christmas doesn't shout over speakers in a mall - it whispers a timeless message that has the simple, spare beauty of bare branches in winter:

God loved us so much that he sent His only son to live among us and sacrifice His own life, so that we can find peace, love and happiness forever.

That's the light at the top of the tree.

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E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com