Jess Castellote
Fvery season, every big celebration, every community has its own look and feel, its own aesthetic character. Over time, colours, textures, light, visual symbols, become like a signature. Christmas is no exception. Above all, it is a religious celebration, rooted in a story that has shaped cultures for centuries; but it also carries its own unmistakable visual language. Long before December 25 arrives, its colours, lights, and symbols start showing up and we just know that Christmas is coming. These elements do not replace its spiritual meaning, but they give the season a unique character—one that is immediately recognizable wherever it appears.
Passing through the decorated streets of Victoria Island, I have found myself thinking about this, about how Christmas announces itself visually. Already in November, we began to see familiar things: strings of lights over doorways, evergreen branches, red and gold ornaments, rope lighting covering walls and fences, maybe a plastic reindeer guarding a gate. The details shift with climate and culture, but one thing keeps returning: light. In some places far from Nigeria, Christmas arrives with falling snow and long winter nights. Here in Lagos, it comes with harmattan’s pale skies and warm, dusty evenings. Yet wherever it appears, light is the part of the season that shapes everything else. That is not accidental. It’s something passed down.
Christmas has its own visual grammar. It has a way of turning ordinary spaces into something slightly charmed. The whole mood begins with small glimmers—strings of bulbs, candles, stars—soft light that makes a room or space feel welcoming. Around that glow gather the usual Christmas colours: reds and greens, golds and silvers. Nature slips in through wreaths, bits of greenery, berries, flowers. Religious imagery appears quietly—a Nativity scene on a shelf, an angel, the guiding star of the wise men. Together with ornaments, ribbons, and decorated trees, these pieces create an atmosphere that is both festive and welcoming. This is the Christmas aesthetic: a visual language almost everyone recognizes. And running through every version of it is light—not just decoration but meaning made visible.
Centuries before Christ’s birth, the prophet Isaiah wrote, “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.” At the heart of Christmas lies a story about light entering darkness: a Child born in obscurity, a star announcing the news. In Christian tradition, Christ is “the Light of the world,” and the Nativity story is full of images of illumination—the star guiding the wise men, light breaking into night. So, when we light candles or hang Christmas lights, we are not only decorating. We are leaning into a metaphor, making a small statement that light persists even when darkness seems thicker, that redemption is possible, a reminder that speaks to most of us, whatever our beliefs.
Christmas lights have held this symbolic weight for a long time. That’s why the lights feel right even here in Lagos, where nobody’s ever seen snow and December nights are still warm. The first strings of bulbs blinking along Ajose Adeogun Street in early November, near where I live, in early November carry the same weight as the ones on a snowy street in Stockholm. The backdrop is different—harmattan haze instead of flurries, sweating in traffic instead of shivering—but the instinct is the same: we need to brighten things up. This adaptability is part of the charm. A plastic tree in an air-conditioned Lagos home looks nothing like one in a Berlin suburb, yet both speak the same visual language.
I am not especially interested in discussing whether Nigerian Christmas aesthetics are “authentic” compared to the pictures on Christmas cards from Europe. What interests me is how light works as a visual language across such different environments. What does it actually do? It shifts the atmosphere of a place, even briefly. It lifts the eye. It signals celebration, hope, and the return of light—whether that’s literal or symbolic. In Scandinavia, where December daylight barely exists, Christmas lights began as a practical need that slowly became something poetic. In Nigeria, where daylight is generous and reliable, lights have a different meaning. They speak of abundance, of deliberate radiance, of marking a spiritual moment with colour and brightness. Yet both are recognisably Christmas.
Nigerian Christmas lights are rarely subtle or understated. Like many things here, we favour saturation: gold that gleams, deep greens, rich reds. Bulbs blink in complicated sequences. Some compounds outline entire buildings in rope light until they look like wrapped parcels. Last year I saw a 10-metre tree made entirely of blue LEDs that kept changing pattern; from a distance, it looked like a column of captured lightning. The lights appearing on Lagos streets each November aren’t mere imitation. It is Christmas speaking with a Lagos accent, using the same grammar of light in a way that fits our rhythm. Harmattan—cooler, dustier, signalling a shift—serves as our atmospheric backdrop the way winter serves northern traditions. The early appearance of lights simply acknowledges that seasons behave differently here, and that the aesthetic can adjust without losing its character.
Elsewhere I have written about the peculiar communal aesthetics of Nigeria. Light also brings a communal visual element to this season. Every small effort contributes to a shared brightness: the string of bulbs outside a shop, a neighbour’s modest tree, a public display somewhere. This collective glow becomes a seasonal conversation, a way of saying: We are entering this time together. Even small lights participate. A single candle or a few coloured bulbs can lift the mood of an entire space, reminding us that celebration does not depend on extravagance. This might be the Christmas aesthetic at its clearest: humanity’s annual, collective decision to push back against the dark. Harmattan can blow, prices can bite, power can come and go, yet for a few weeks we insist on brightness. Generators cough to life, inverters hum, solar batteries give what they can, but the lights must come on anyway.
Perhaps that is what the Christmas aesthetic ultimately represents: not a fixed visual formula imported wholesale across the world, but a flexible symbolic language that invites reinterpretation. Light means something in every context. At Christmas, we choose to emphasise it, to amplify it, to make it the visual centre of our celebration. Whether it falls on snow or on dusty harmattan air, on cold streets or warm evenings, it carries the same underlying message: that illumination matters, that darkness is temporary, that beauty and hope can be made visible.
So, this year, as the lights are already twinkling—some might say too early—I find myself happy and smiling at them. They remind me that beauty doesn’t need much, that even a single strand of bulbs matters, and that hope often shows up quietly, glowing in the dark. Because a child was born who was called the Light of the World, and we have decided, in our own loud, dusty, generator-powered way, to keep the announcement burning bright.
• Castellote, PhD is the Director. YSMA. Pan-Atlantic University
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