By Rick Garcia
Like many families in neighborhoods across the country, I go through the holiday ritual like a surgeon preparing for an operation, donning strands after strands of colorful, twinkling lights all over my home.
Tradition passes from father to son, despite the advancement and technology of decorative illumination from grenade-sized bulbs to the hi-def LED or from the plastic Santa and his reindeers to the “blow-up” snowman.
Christmas lighting is unique to every home. Not one display is the same. To be politically correct, “Holiday Lights” also involves other denominations and cultures. I remember our Jewish neighbors putting up blue and white lights and electric Menorah for Hanukka. Just when and where did all this madness come from?
First, we can thank Thomas Edison during the Christmas of 1880 where he brought us the first electric Christmas light display. Edison, known for his incandescent light bulbs, was also a genius when it came to promoting and advertising his glowing wonder. Writer Brian Murray’s article “Christmas Lights and Community Building in America,” describes back during that holiday season. To display his invention as a means of heightening Yuletide excitement, Edison wired incandescent bulbs all around his laboratory compound in Menlo Park, which coincidentally, was nearby a railway where passengers could witness this spectacular holiday wonder. What made it more intriguing was that Edison cleverly powered the lights from a remote generator eight miles away.
Two years later, an Edison crony named Edward Johnson displayed the first electric charged illuminated Christmas tree at his home in Manhattan. The then-impressive 80-light display overshadowed an anemic, dried out Christmas tree. The tradition of stringing electric lights may have started as a common Christmas practice in America, but is now graced everywhere at winter festivals around the world. It’s a practice we take for granted—come December, they’re everywhere. The evolution of the Christmas light parallels that of the light bulb.
In 1900, eight years after General Electric purchased the patent rights to Edison’s bulbs, the first known advertisement for Christmas tree lights appeared in Scientific American Magazine. These were so expensive that the ad suggests renting lights for a holiday display.
Twenty-five years later, demand was up. There were 15 companies in the biz of selling Christmas lights, and in 1925 they formed a consortium called the NOMA Electric Corporation, the largest Christmas light manufacturer in the world.
Today, Holiday lighting displays are a billion-dollar industry and many “Chevy Chase” inspired people will do whatever it takes at no expense to become the “King” of the block or neighborhood, for a friendly competition between the “Joneses.”
The best part of households taking part of this seasonal electric parade of lights is that it is a community effort. It is even more apparent when driving at night and you can already identify homes based on their creative colorful space.
The only drawback to holiday lighting is the work involved in putting them up and taking them down. If you do it before the real cold kicks in, you’ll have the luxury of hanging soft flexible strands and not a stiff, prickly cable. Add your yard and trees, now you have a weekend project.
I’m compelled to follow my father’s simple solution to avoid this tedious task – keep them up all year-round. The urban dictionary defines this as a “Nerkle.”
Rick Garcia, a nonprofit executive, a civil rights advocate, blogger and a contributing writer for The New Citizens Press can be reached at rrgarcianrg@gmail.com
This was printed in the December 15, 2013 – December 28, 2013 Edition
