Light 23: Electric Christmas Lights

By Circe -

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

A family of rats gathered to look at the Christmas lights.
Twinkling lights are an integral part of the Christmas experience, I feel. Even the rats got their own. For centuries, the only lights you could put on a Christmas tree were some carefully-balanced candles. This was less than ideal. One rambunctious cat and your tiny twinkling lights might become a tree-size fire. 

The strings of tiny lamps we associate with Christmas trees today were a product of the Victorian electrification craze. In 1886, only a few years after the light bulb was invented in the first place, a guy named Edward Johnson strung eight of them together, stuck them on a tree, and impressed the bejeezus out of everyone who saw it. Partly this was because electricity! Partly this was because of the expense. Eight bulbs cost about a weeks' wage for most people. 

Plus they looked, y'know, pretty dangerous. So did everything else electric in 1886, but the point stands.

It wasn't until the 1920s that pre-assembled electric Christmas lights became available. They were still a bit pricey, but very on trend -- the White House had electrified their Christmas trees in the 1890s, and the trend spread from there. By the time Rockefeller Center started putting up their tree in 1931, candles were a thing of the past, and it was all electricity from here on out. 

By the time I was born, Christmas lights had gone from 2" glass bulbs to little half-inch twinkles, although the change had happened recently enough that I remember strings still being labeled as "mini-lights" when I was a kid. Around the turn of the 21st century, we saw the first LED light strings emerge; though they were expensive af when they first came out, LED string, tape, and fairy lights are now cheap enough that I have literally gaff taped hundreds of them to the walls of my bedroom, pending enough motivation to buy some drywall anchors and get up on a chair to hang them properly. 

For a far deeper and more incisive history of Christmas lights than I could manage, see Alec on Technology Connections. Alec has... a lot of opinions on the subject, which recur every year.

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