Today in 1882, a big moment in holiday decorations: for the first time, a Christmas tree was festooned with colorful electric lights.
This was the handiwork of one Edward Hibberd Johnson.
At one point Johnson hired a young Thomas Edison to work for his company; later, when Edison set out on his own, he hired his old mentor as vice president for his firm.
Johnson was an inventor and an electrical evangelist, who spotted a solution to a common holiday conundrum.
It was common in his day to light up Christmas trees with wax candles; these looked lovely except for the whole fire danger thing.
So, for his Christmas tree, he wired up a set of red, white and blue lightbulbs, and he made it so the tree would rotate!
This was a sensation in his part of New York City (partly because he made sure to let the newspapers know).
He put up another tree the next year, and the next, and over time the lights got brighter and fancier and more plentiful.
By 1895 President Grover Cleveland had an electric tree up at the White House.
But this wasn’t something the general public could do just yet: electric lights on a tree at that point required an electrician to set the whole apparatus up.
In 1903, companies started selling what they called festoons: pre-wired, pre-strung sets of lights that people could plug in and use on their own.
As access to electric service spread across the country, more and more families decided their Christmas trees needed Christmas lights.
Here we are, more than a century after that first set of tree lights, at a time when people are using LEDs for these enormous and incredibly creative light installations, sometimes synched up to music or drones or who knows what else.
And it all brings to mind one big question: why haven’t we brought back the spinning trees yet?!?
Iceland has a fascinating Christmas tradition: the Yule Cat.
According to a poem by Jóhannes úr Kötlum from 1932, the job of the Jólakötturinn, or Christmas Cat, was to encourage kids to be good.
Misbehavior, you see, would distract the adults, who then couldn’t do their jobs.
And if they couldn’t do their jobs then everyone would be poor, and the cat would eat anyone who didn’t get new clothes as Christmas gifts!?!
Suddenly a lump of coal in a stocking doesn’t seem so bad.
Who invented electric Christmas lights? (Library of Congress)
A festive feline: Iceland’s terrifying Christmas Yule Cat (History.co.uk)
