Standing in the Road With a Paper Cup: A Field Guide to Switch-On Night

The lights switch-on is a strange and wonderful thing. Somewhere in your town, on some dark Friday in late November or early December, a crowd of a few hundred people will stand in a closed road for forty minutes and watch a slightly unreliable countdown. Someone will be holding a paper cup of something hot. A child will be on a parent's shoulders, crying or laughing, or both.

And then the tree will blink into life and everyone will cheer in a way that is completely out of proportion to the achievement. We love it. We go every year. But we've also learned how to go properly.

Here's our plan.

One — treat the timetable as a rumour

There will be a poster. The poster will have times on it. Those times are not facts, they're a rough aspiration. The choir will start late because a coach is delayed. The brass band will play four carols instead of two because they've got momentum. The countdown will happen at some point nobody predicted, and the person with the microphone will nearly miss the switch.

Accept this before you leave the house. Bring a torch, wear your warmest coat, and let the evening take as long as it wants. If you've mentally allowed for ninety minutes of wandering, the timing stops being a problem and becomes part of the charm.

Two — do not arrive early. Arrive late.

The most useful thing we've ever done on switch-on night is dawdle. Go for a walk first. Have a cup of tea somewhere. Turn up twenty minutes after the advertised start, when the first crush has settled into a friendly crowd, when you can actually get to the bit where the food stalls are, and when the smaller children have already been cleared off the best standing spots by exhaustion.

Arriving late also means you miss nothing important. There is, genuinely, nothing to miss before the choir starts.

Three — the school choir is the main event

There is a temptation to think of the school choir as the warm-up. It is not. It is the reason to come.

Somewhere in that huddle of children in too-large Santa hats, one is doing the actions with total commitment and slightly ahead of everyone else. One is visibly furious about the actions. One is staring at the crowd, having completely forgotten the words. The sound is thin and slightly sharp and occasionally one microphone is far too loud.

It is one of the loveliest things you will see all winter. Put your phone down for the second verse.

Four — the chip shop queue is not a delay, it is a venue

After the switch there'll be a surge of people with the same idea. The queue will go out of the door and onto the pavement, in the cold, in a line that appears not to move.

Stay in it. This is where the evening lives. You will overhear someone complain about the council, someone else defend it, a teacher greeting a former pupil, and two people discovering they're second cousins. You'll be handed a chippy that is too hot to hold, and by the time you get it, half your evening's entertainment will have been absorbed for free.

Our advice: order something small. Ten minutes later you'll all only care about being warm.

Five — go to the market stalls, but with a budget

The stalls sell the same things every year: a scented candle, a reindeer made of willow, mulled something, a jar of local honey, a foot-long ruler-shaped bag of sweets. None of it is necessary. All of it is delightful.

Give yourself a limit — ours is a fiver each, plus one unavoidably decent hot drink — and spend it on one thing, not four. Last year we came home with a bottle of elderberry cordial and a small knitted bird with a legend on the label saying "made by Margaret, 87". Margaret did well.

Six — leave before the crowd does

Not early in a way that seems rude. Just don't be the last out. Leave while the lights are still doing their loop and the road is still full and someone is still singing. Walk the long way home, past the tree, past the houses with the good displays.

You'll get home with cold hands and a paper cup to throw away and a slight ringing in your ears, and you'll already be thinking about next year.

The bit we'd defend to the end

The switch-on is not a slick event, and it's better for it. The sound system will cut out. The countdown will be out of sync. A dog will bark through the quiet bit. Somebody's child will lose a glove.

None of that is a flaw in the evening. It's the evening. A city centre light show with a stage and a screen doesn't need you. Your high street does — it needs you to stand in the road in a bad hat, cheer at the third attempt, and buy something from someone's nan.

So go. Arrive late, queue for chips, keep a fiver for something unnecessary, and clap louder than is reasonable. That's the whole plan.