How Christmas lights became a nerdy obsession
Les illuminations de Noël, une tradition au Royaume-Uni.
À l’approche des fêtes de fin d’année, les rues des centres villes se parent de mille et une lumières. Au Royaume-Uni, les illuminations de Noël font partie intégrante de la tradition, au même titre que le Christmas pudding. Celles de Londres, mises en route par des célébrités, créent toujours l’événement. Cette année, ce sont les membres du groupe Queen qui ont allumé les décorations de Carnaby Street. Retour sur une tradition qui n’est pas prête de s’éteindre.
Ilove Christmas lights. I am writing this in my living room, with no overhead lights on. All the illumination is coming from seven strands of lights – one on the tree, six more around the walls; several hundred bulbs. I love them so much that the ones that aren’t on the tree stay up all year. Every year I buy a few more sets, for no good reason – I just find it hard to walk past a shelf of lights without buying a set. I’m not alone in my passion. Although John Lewis won’t give out exact figures, its spokeswoman tells me the chain sells hundreds of thousands of sets of lights each year, its bestseller being an 11m string of 480 white lights in a vine style, yours for 50 quid.
A GERMANIC INNOVATION
2. Lights on Christmas trees are a Germanic innovation, and prosperous Germans first started illuminating their trees with candles in the 18th century: “Coleridge describes seeing it in northern Germany in 1798,” says Judith Flanders, author of Christmas: A Biography. “The problem with that is that it was dangerous: candles on a tree drying out indoors ended up with something highly flammable.”
3. The first electrically illuminated tree was unveiled on 22 December 1882, in the New York home of Edward H Johnson, a friend of Thomas Edison and vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company. He draped his tree with 80-handwired bulbs in red, white and blue. Thirteen years later, President
Grover Cleveland oversaw the first electrically lit tree in the White House and, over the following half-century, electric Christmas lights followed the democratisation of electricity.
DEMOCRATISATION
4. “It wasn’t until the 1930s or later that a lot of houses got electricity,” Flanders says. “We forget how late electricity actually came to a lot of houses. The manufacturing of strings of lights was there, so what happened in the early days was that you could buy batterypowered lights so houses without electricity could have some lighting, and those were manufactured as early as 1903. But they were very expensive. It’s around the 1910s and 1920s that they start to become affordable for the middle classes.”
5. In fact, Flanders says, one of the key drivers of electric Christmas lights in the home was the insurance industry. “Because candles were so dangerous, many insurance companies refused to insure houses with candles, rather than electric lights. Not only do you have to affix candles to trees but, as they burn down they tilt, because the weight on the candles changes. They were lethal.”
IN CITY CENTRES
6. Nowadays, of course, Christmas lights aren’t limited to the home. For years, every town centre worth its salt has a Christmas lights display, often turned on by a minor celebrity – or, in the case of Piers Morgan and Stockbridge in Hampshire last year, not turned on, when the plunger didn’t work. The big displays in the central London shopping
streets are largely the work of two companies, Field and Lawn – a marquee hire company that moved into Christmas lighting seven years ago – and James Glancy Design.
CONSIDERATIONS
7. Between them, they are responsible for the lights on Oxford Street, Bond Street, Regent Street, Carnaby Street, Jermyn Street, St Christopher’s Place, Seven Dials, as well as shopping centres and town centres across the UK. “On Oxford Street, we used around three quarters of a million lights,” says Nick McLaren of Field and Lawn. Field and Lawn, he says, spends about £1m each year on brand new lights for its designs. This is big business. 8. Obviously, providing a bespoke lighting display to a huge shopping street isn’t simply a case of finding some spare plug sockets and stringing up some lights you got from Homebase. James Glancy, who co-founded the firm that bears his name with Paul Dart, who does the design work, lists the things that have to be taken into consideration: the ability of your design to withstand snow and wind, the likelihood of your street acting as a wind tunnel, its length and width, the height of the buildings, the ownership of the buildings. 9. You have to take into account whether your design is going to make it hard for office workers to get on with their jobs, and if it will annoy people who live within its glare. From bidding for the job, through assessing the site, drawing up the design, testing a full-scale prototype and getting it approved, to then hanging the lights can take up to 11 months. And, at the end, you must have something memorable, or you can be sure people will let you know their dissatisfaction.
“On Oxford Street, we used around three quarters of a million lights.”