The Painter of Light

Yes, we have Thomas Kincaid lithographs all over the house. The garage is used for the overflow of them, but they’re in the rumpus room (that’s where we keep the pool table and the ceramic Santa), the kitchen, and the living room, too. And during my pre-teen years, I used to buy Mom China plates with his most famous illustrations on them, because they were only thirty dollars at the local Chatzchkie shop, The Vicar’s Cottage. Her birthday is in June and since Mother’s Day is a month before, I’d go pick out two in January that I knew she’d like, usually the ones with the most colorful lights and an animal in the distance. I’d pay four of my five dollar allowance toward the layaway every few weeks, and spend the other dollar on two jelly-filled donuts from the Chinese donut shop next door. By April I’d have purchased both plates, then hide them under my bed until gift-giving.

Those plates are in the glass china display in the dining room, now where no one is allowed in except for on Christmas Eve, but by then the plates are wrapped up and hidden away, replaced with Christmas-themed nutcrackers collected over the years from Wicks ‘N Sticks. “We keep them in the hutch for decoration because we don’t eat nuts,” Mom had told me when I asked if I could bring the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer nutcracker to show and tell in the third grade.

Mom’s favorite painting of Kincaide’s seems to be his most famous, called “The Christmas Cottage.” She loves Christmastime, and this photo seems to sum up the American Dream, through the eyes of the shattered, track-home living, middle-aged Folsom lady: cobblestone walkway, snow-covered evergreens, a white picket gate, all surrounding a custom built home on a big lot in Serenity, USA.

This painting is hung in the entryway, year round, right above where we keep the commemorative dish we got from McDonald’s of the claymation California Raisins. Inside the dish is where we keep next week’s lottery tickets.

Mom gave me one of her old framed Kincaide pictures, of the famous Folsom landmark, Sutter Street, to hang in my apartment in Burbank, when I moved there after college to work as an NBC page. I hung it in our dining room until my roommate told me it looked gay. Mom couldn’t believe it. “Gay,” she had asked. “I don’t think so. He’s the painter of light.”