The Dark Side of Holiday Lights
How can something so cheerful and twinkly cause so much annoyance and so many trips to the store for extension cords, fuses and replacement bulbs?
Nevertheless, America’s Christmases are getting brighter every year.
About 80% of all U.S. households will illuminate a tree this season. And industry sources say consumers are using hundreds more lights per tree than even a decade ago--$1.25-billion worth of lights at retail. More than 300 million strings of lights are expected to be sold this month, an increase of 40% from 1998.
Icicles, mesh lights, tiny fairy twinklers, colored bulbs the size of kumquats. They’re all possibilities for the season.
The nation’s booming economy, with more cash to spend, certainly has done its part in the great holiday light show, but so have light manufacturers. Prices have been dropping each year, to the point where the generic 100-light set now costs less than a gallon of milk. At Target, Washington area district team leader Marsha Gill says, the new pearl lights--tiny round lights that come in six colors--are hot ($9.99 for 70 lights). She also reports that Target’s 100-bulb strings for $1.99 have had to be restocked every two hours.
Each year, there also is some new lighting trend to encourage us to buy more. For the past decade, the biggest sellers have been all-white lights, retailers say, although there’s been a small move back toward color this year. Outdoors, curtains of icicle lights continue to be the rage, with some neighborhoods switching over entirely to the look.
Nostalgic baby boomers are indulging a retro fondness for the multicolored bubbling candles and large 1950s-era Snowball lights that conjure up Christmases past. (Restoration Hardware sells both kinds: A set of 10 Snowballs for $14.)
Convenience is another big seller. K mart is offering the Trim-a-Home Perfect Lighted Tree for $179.99. It’s a 7 1/2-foot artificial tree with 1,000 pre-strung lights.
I wish my husband would consider something so simple.
After surviving the hassle of getting a Christmas tree home in the car, hacking off the lower branches, wedging the trunk into the stand and debating about the degree of tilt, he begins to work on the lights.
As our 9-year-old son tells it:
“Dad sits down on the floor and starts straightening out the strings of lights. Then he starts wrapping them around the tree. It takes all day. Or even two days. He’s sort of grumpy, especially if some of the lights go off after he’s all finished. Sometimes, when he finds a knot in the string, he gets really mad. Mom and I stay out of his way.”
Part of the problem is that when my husband tackles a project, he insists on perfection. It’s not enough to just throw up a few strings of lights, some eggnog and start hanging ornaments. Oh, no. This guy’s routine involves meticulously placing 1,000 tiny white lights on every single inch of our Fraser fir.
“My method is, start at the bottom of the tree, wind around each branch in a reverse spiral motion bringing it out to the tip of each major branch,” he says. “Then take it back toward the trunk, taking it over to the next branch and continuing the motion as you make your way up the tree . . .”
See what I mean?
And from what I hear from friends and co-workers, we are not alone in our annual angst. People obsess about spacing lights evenly, about not letting any wires show, about storing strings from year to year intricately wound around paper-towel tubes or in plastic newspaper bags.
“My husband complains constantly while he’s putting up the lights,” says one Washington woman. “He’s pretty fussy about it, and he and my daughter end up having a fight because she wants to start decorating and he’s not finished yet.”
Meanwhile, in researching this article, I became alerted to a new concern. I hoofed it up to my cold and dusty attic where I pulled down the box labeled “Christmas Lights.” Inside, I unpacked my husband’s neatly coiled strings nestled in individual zippered plastic bags. There were 15 bags.
I called him at work and asked him how many strings he had been wiring together all these years. He said, “All of them.”
Our finished tree may look like perfection, but it’s been an accident waiting to happen.
“People don’t read the directions on the box,” says Nori Juba, CEO and president of Minami International Corp. in Yonkers, N.Y., a major manufacturer and distributor of lights. “You can’t connect more than three strings of lights together for safety. It will cause problems.”
You’re telling me. This might cut at least an hour off of tree-lighting day.
Kathy Presciano, a lighting specialist with General Electric Lighting, was in Washington last week to oversee stringing the National Christmas Tree with 75,000 GE lights.
Even though she lights for a living, she agrees the at-home job can be tricky. “It’s very stressful. I’m lucky in that the projects I do have teams of professional installers. As I was putting mine up, I was laughing to myself, ‘You don’t usually do this.’ ”
Presciano says when lighting her own tree, she starts from the top and uses a layering technique. “I put one layer of small sparkling twinkle lights as a base coat; then I add purple and gold lights. It gives it texture and excitement.”
Juba, on the other hand, starts at the bottom, uses the wrapping method and walks around the tree often to see how it looks from all sides. He puts 1,200 lights on his 7-foot tree and he says it takes about an hour and a half.
He admits that before environmental concerns kicked in, he would simply unplug his tree and dump it--lights and all--on the curb. These days, he uses a pair of scissors to cut off all the lights before putting out the tree for recycling. Each year, he starts with brand-new lights, but then, he is the president of the company.
Peter Trovato, an executive at Kurt S. Adler of New York City, a major importer of holiday lights, says he and his wife do not always agree on light placement for the tree in their home. They start early Sunday morning and it can take all day. Sometimes, he puts the lights on seven or eight different times to make his wife happy. “I’ve been in this business 26 years, and I’ve been married 22 years. It’s the only time of the year we have an argument.”
One year, Trovato sent his wife to her mother’s house. “I said, ‘Come back and the tree will be done.’ I took all the lights off and flung them on the tree. When she came back, I told her, ‘This is how they are doing it in New York.’ ”
This year, he’s got a fresh plan.
“I may try the new netting lights. Call me next week, and I’ll tell you if my wife throws me out of the house.”
