Posted on 12/03/2017 9:38:01 AM PST by bgill
Thomas Edison patented the light bulb in 1880. To drum up excitement around Christmas time, he strung up incandescent bulbs all around his Menlo Park laboratory compound to dazzle passing railway commuters. Two years later, Edison’s associate Edward Johnson had the brilliant idea to use electric lights to replace the beautiful, (but extremely hazardous!) candles used to decorate Christmas trees. He wrapped a tree with a string of 80 red, white and blue light bulbs and set it on a revolving platform in a window. Despite onlookers’ delight, due to expense (and a general distrust of indoor lighting) it would be decades before the tradition took off. But in 1894 President Cleveland put electric lights on the White House tree. By 1900, a string of 16 flame-shaped bulbs sold for a pricey $12 (that’s about $350 in today’s money).
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We have a local Dentist that started making the Holiday News every year starting about 20 years ago; he was the first to decorate all of the evergreens on his property with LED Christmas lights. Man, you could see those things for MILES and they really were/are very pretty.
He sunk THOUSANDS of dollars into it. I’ll bet he’s mad at how inexpensive they’ve become! I have some of those ticky-tacky metal reindeer and we just put fresh, white LEDs on them. They’re so pretty - and since we have no light other than the Moon out here in the boonies, I’m expecting Santa to land his sleigh right on my front lawn this year! :)
This is his line of evergreens along University Avenue in, 'The People's Republik of Madistan,' WI.
nerkle (NUR kel) - n. A person who leaves Christmas lights up all year.
I never heard of “holiday lights”.
Do they mean Christmas lights?
I remember how Jimmy Carter said not to put up Christmas lights, and since then there has always been less and less.
The good news is that eventually Christmas comes and goes, and then she takes all of the lights down. And tells me the life story of every string of bulbs and all of the timers.
The year Carter said that was the year my family bought and put up these big 3 foot tall candles every few feet lining both sides of our long driveway as well as usual outdoor lights!
Not burning down the house has a certain attraction, which is why it spread.
That’s great!
The damage parents can do is unlimited.
An absolutely great story catch for the season. Thank you.
“less lights?” Not in my neighborhood...seems this year they are earlier and more abundant. And, we don’t have ours up yet!
Wow, impressive.
I miss bubble lights.
LED lights are still sort of pricey (compared to traditional lights) but I made the investment. I have my house covered in them. My Yule Time electric bills have gone down drastically as a result. But I’m a bit disappointed in the “softness” of the lighting. They are just not as bright as they used to be. Still, I have enough light to read by without having to turn on any other lights!
That sort of attitude made it’s way up here to the Great White North. My late grandfather at his farm had a tall cedar tree that he covered in lights and three coloured floodlights at the front and this nice display certainly made an impact on me as a small child. Some time later, he cut that back greatly and kept only a small display in the front porch area. I asked Grandma about it when I was a teenager (and after Grandpa had recently passed away in 1984) and she told me that by the mid to late 1970s, it was told to people to scale back on outdoor Christmas light displays in order to save on hydro.
Re: Bubble Lights. Vermont Country Store has them. I got me some.
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