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.