During the 1880 Christmas season, Thomas Edison strung a line of electric lights outside his Menlo Park, N.J. laboratory, enchanting travelers on passing trains. And on December 22, in 1882, Edison’s partner in the Edison Illumination Company, Edward H. Johnson, hung the first string of 80 electric Christmas tree lights, an Edison’s creation, from a spinning tree it the parlor of his mansion!
This is the first time that the Christmas gained their lights!
A century and some years ago, Christmas lights were an extravagance item! They were equivalent to Tiffany windows and Faberge eggs, mainly due to the high price of electricity. Some estimation put the cost of lighting a Christmas tree at $2,000 in today’s dollars. The public could enjoy the lights, but only at a distance.
A visitor in the mansion told Detroit Post and Tribune paper the following: “all encased in these dainty glass eggs, and presented a most uncanny and picturesque aspect; the result was a continuous twinkling of dancing colors—red, white, blue, white, red, blue – all the evening, like the tree laden with lambent splendor that sparkles above the fountains in Aladdin’s palace. I need not tell you that the scintillating evergreen was a pretty sight – one can hardly imagine anything prettier.”
Of course it would be couple decades later before Christmas tree lights became affordable for ordinary Americans.
Well, sometimes it is a lot of work, but the Christmas lights have to be finally up!!!
Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!
KO for eCharta
On 19 December 1843 a novella by English author Charles Dickens published by Chapman & Hall. This was A Christmas Carol!
Everyone knows the story that tells of sour and miserly Ebeneezer Scrooge’s conceptual, ethical, and emotional transformation resulting from supernatural visits from Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. The novella met with instant success and critical acclaim.
The book was written and published right on time when in early Victorian era Britain, was born both strong nostalgia for old Christmas traditions and a beginning of new practices such as Christmas trees and greeting cards.
Dickens’s sources for the tale appear to be many and varied but are mainly the embarrassing experiences of his childhood, his compassion for the poor, and various Christmas stories and fairy tales.
A Christmas Carol remains popular until today, has never been out of print, and has been adapted to film, stage, opera, and other media multiple times.
Dickens’ Carol was one of the greatest inspirations in revitalizing the old Christmas traditions of England. It brings to the reader images of light, joy, warmth and life and at the same time it brings strong and remarkable images of darkness, hopelessness, coldness, sadness and death. Scrooge himself is the personification of misery but is followed by the renewal of life, so too is Scrooge’s cold, pinched heart restored to the innocent goodwill he had known in his childhood and youth.
A Christmas Carol was published 27 years before the author’s death. When Dickens died on June 9, 1870, his obituary in The New York Times said “He was incomparably the greatest novelist of his time.”
We get into festive spirit with the most famous Christmas book of all time!
Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!
KO for eCharta
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