Our Love Affair with Christmas Lights

In the modern day, nothing announces the arrival of the holiday season quite as extravagantly as Christmas lights. Driving or walking around town to witness the most lavish displays has become an annual tradition for many of us. Light enthusiasts create breathtaking spectacles of color and ingenious design that could brighten the heart of Ebenezer Scrooge during this time of year.

Nowadays, people can tour even outside of their home areas thanks to the Trail of Lights events in states like Virginia and Texas, where routes run between adjacent towns and afford travelers the opportunity to see the best displays in each one. Virtually the whole town of Marble Falls, Texas, has dedicated itself to arrays of lights that depict such scenes as Santa Clause water skiing, flying a plane, and piloting a steamship. Lights have been spotted lining the furrows of plowed fields in Tennessee and the lanes of Boston's Milky Way bowling alley.

Fly the Kids, a nonprofit organization that operated from 1993-2000, took more than 40,000 desperately ill children on aerial tours of the holiday lights in helicopters and small planes.

When did all this extravagance begin? Actually, the tradition of celebrating with lights in late December - the darkest time of the year - dates back to ancient solstice festivals. The Anglo-Saxons of Germany, for example, burned their giant Yule log (the forerunner of our own Christmas icon) to defy the darkness and cold and welcome the return of the sun after the longest night. Later, they began decorating living trees with lit candles. The American Christmas tree was created, thus, from elements borrowed from older cultures. But Americans did contribute their own ideas to the decorations - most notably, with lights, after Thomas Edison's invention of the light bulb in 1879.

One of the executives in Edison's company, Edward Johnson, took some lights home in 1882 and put them on his own Christmas tree. Edison himself realized the potential profit that could be reaped from such fixtures, and he started manufacturing and selling electric lights specifically for the holidays. The whole country was exposed to such lights in 1895, when President Grover Cleveland used them to adorn the White House Christmas tree.

Average people couldn't afford the lights back then, so the trend was really started by city retail stores that decorated their windows with lights to attract customers. Normal folks were usually obliged to rent lights for the holidays, until advancements in technology made them much more affordable. Then they became something greater than a commodity; they were a vehicle of self-expression, a means of bringing beauty and a buoyant spirit into the community.

Perhaps Christmas lights offer a creative outlet for so many people who feel stifled by the drab conformity in our culture. They are, indeed, welcome antidotes to a gray world. Like dressing up for Halloween, decorating with Christmas lights allows us to live out our fantasies, make a statement, and break up some of the monotony of our everyday lives.