As Christmas approaches, millions of Americans will partake in the yearly tradition of pulling a tangled mess of lights out of their closets and hanging them over roofs, across walls, and across their front yard. But, as you’re probably aware, massive traditions (be they of the marketing variety or the holiday variety or both) don’t just spring up out of the blue. In fact, there is a 150-year-old history in the United States surrounding these mass-produced novelty lights and their origins are fascinating. 

The First Christmas Lights 

Fun fact: Americans have been lighting up Christmas trees since the early 19th century—long before the invention of the modern light bulb. In those days, families would decorate trees in their living rooms and then attach actual burning candles to the branches.  Unsurprisingly, this was a serious fire hazard. 

For safety reasons, families would gather around to light the candles each year for an hour, usually while standing by with pails of water and bags of sand to douse any rogue flames if the display got out of hand. Still, accidents were so routine that by 1908, a group of American insurers began refusing to pay claims related to Christmas tree fires. Classic insurance companies.  

In 1879, Thomas Edison had just perfected the world’s first practical light bulb and was in the middle of an all-out media blitz to bring attention to his new product. On New Year's Eve, he drew thousands of people to his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where, according to Forbes, he showed off his new invention with “a live outdoor display with dozens of incandescent lamps strung together”—what some call the world’s first string lights. 

But Christmas and strings of electric light wouldn’t be tied together for three more years. On December 22, 1882, Edward H. Johnson—an impressively mustachioed inventor and vice president at the Edison Electric Light Company—set up a holiday-themed display in his Manhattan home to demonstrate the beauty of electric light: 80 twinkling red, white, and blue bulbs strung between the boughs of a large Christmas tree, which he mounted on a rotating platform in his living room. A little over the top if you ask me, but Johnson was a bit of a showoff.  

A reporter from the Detroit Post & Tribune could barely contain his enthusiasm for the “fantastic tree with its starry fruit” and the novel lights “encased in these dainty glass eggs”—his old-timey way of describing the multicolored bulbs. “One could hardly imagine anything prettier,” he wrote. 

 Let There Be Light 

The publicity stunt caught the country’s attention, and by 1890 General Electric had begun manufacturing electric Christmas lights. Unfortunately, back then, only the rich could afford Christmas lights.  In order install the lights, you needed to buy a generator or battery to provide power, and then you needed to pay a trained “wireman” to individually wire each bulb. Decorating a house could cost as much as $300—about $9000 today. This made the concept of decorating with light displays a status symbol. According to a dissertation on Christmas lights by Kerri Dean, the expensive lights became the “rage amongst the wealthy,” and “Christmas tree parties" to show off the expensive electric lighted tree became exciting social events for children of high society.” 

As technology improved, Christmas lights got cheaper and safer. The early versions burned so hot they could still cause fires, but technological advances began making the bulbs safer. In 1903, department stores began carrying pre-wired strings of eight lights for a hefty $12—more than $300 in today’s dollars. Families who couldn’t afford to buy a string of lights outright could rent one for the season for $1.50—about $40 today. By 1914, a string of lights cost just $1.75, and by the ‘20s Christmas lights were affordable for most Americans. 

The White House played a major role in promoting the new trend nationally. In 1894, Grover Cleveland became the first president to celebrate Christmas with electric lights, likely to impress his two young daughters. The tree, according to The Wheeling Register, was “very beautifully trimmed and decorated with tiny parti-colored electric lamps in place of the old-time wax candles.” Cleveland's display featured 100 multicolored bulbs—but it was dwarfed by Calvin Coolidge’s extravaganza of 3000 lights on Christmas in 1923. 

Design Upgrades 

But the Christmas light tradition owes most of its success to electric companies, who saw the holiday trend as an opportunity to sell lighting products. An undated pamphlet titled “All the World’s a Stage at Christmas and All the People on it are Lighting Prospects” pushed the idea that holiday light displays were the industry’s best sales pitch. “The world at Christmas time is the background for a gay, spectacular extravaganza,” the pamphlet declared, and on the Christmas stage “there are quantities of lamps to be sold, Christmas lighting equipment, wiring. There are kilowatt-hours to be sold. Lighting this stage is profitable business for the electrical industry.” 

Just a few years after Coolidge's tree, the Christmas light industry crowned its first king: the NOMA Electric Company, which would dominate the world of Christmas lights until the 1960s. Its founder, Albert Sadacca, picked an unfortunate time to start a novelty lighting business—right in the middle of a terrible economic crisis. But the Christmas light industry weathered the financial storm of the Great Depression through an aggressive advertising campaign that appealed to family, country, and “the importance of a properly celebrated Christmas in trying times such as these.” One genuinely devastating ad in the Saturday Evening Post featured a little boy writing a letter that read “Dear Santy, please come to our hous this year becos we have it lit up now so you can’t miss it enny more.” Heartbreaking stuff that makes me want to go out and buy some new lights. 

Dangerous Innovation 

Then came the age of innovation, as people began to “update” the traditional Christmas tree. In the ‘60s, Americans fell in love with shiny, new aluminum trees. Unfortunately, aluminum is a good conductor of electricity. This meant that faulty Christmas lights could charge aluminum trees with electricity and zap the next person to touch a branch. Since traditional string lights were potentially fatal on a metal tree (DUH), families switched to these weird, rotating color wheels instead, which shined light onto the tree.  

Modern Christmas Lights

The classic mini light design—the familiar incandescent lights in tubular-shaped bulbs that come on perpetually tangled green wires—was first sold in 1970. They’ve dominated the Christmas light market until the recent rise of LED lights, which use between 80 and 90 percent less electricity and can cost a fraction of the price to power. 

While Christmas tree lights have taken many forms over the past century, the tradition of dragging a dead tree into our living room and decorating it has remained a strange fixture of American culture. We’ve come a long way since the days of live candles on pine needles, and you now know that you can thank Edward H. Johnson and the rest of these lighting innovators for minimizing your risk of lighting your house on fire this year and every year following.