by Megan Worley

Created on: December 10, 2008

The most beloved of Christmas traditions, the Christmas tree, has been around since the middle ages. The tradition of lighting a tree to celebrate has also been around for a very long time. The first lights used on a tree, though not technically lights as we know them today, were candles. The tradition of putting candles on trees can be traced back to the 16th century when Martin Luther supposedly decorated a small tree with candles. When the first Christmas trees came to England they too were decorated with candles.

By the light 1800's and early 1900's however candles were beginning to go out of fashion and with the advent of electricity fairy lights were making their way onto the scene. In 1882 Edward Johnson, who was an associate of Thomas Edison's hand wired red, white and blue bulbs and then wound them around an evergreen tree to create the first string of Christmas lights. By 1900 large department stores had begun to put up lighted trees in order to attract customers and the upper crust of society began to host what became known as Christmas tree parties. These trees were very expensive, costing $300, a huge sum of money in those times, and required the use of a generator and a wireman to string the hand-blown lights together.

By 1930's however more and more people had begun manufacturing Christmas lights and their price had dropped enough that they had became a standard part of tree decorating in nearly every home. The first family to begin producing these lights was the Sadacca family. The story claims that when Albert Sadacca was fifteen, in 1917, he got the idea to produce safe Christmas lights after witnessing a tragic fire in New York City. The fire had involved the use of candles to light a Christmas tree. Although the company sold merely 100 strings of white lights that first year they soon began to sell many more with the use of brightly colored bulbs. They eventually went on to have a multi-million dollar company.

Today the use of Christmas tree lights is extremely wide spread. They are used across the globe, inside and outside and in a variety of colors. Today it is extremely rare to see a tree decorated that does not include at least a few strands of light. The lighting of Christmas trees has stayed in the mainstream of holiday traditions. In nearly every major city across the United States there is a tree lighting festival to mark the beginning of the season.

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