Christmas Lights
In the early seventeenth century,
Germans began bringing trees indoors at Christmas and decorating them with candles. It was
the German Prince Albert who popularised the Christmas tree in Britain after putting one
up at Windsor Castle in 1840. Over the next 20 years, candlelit trees became popular, the
lights symbolising rebirth.
In 1882 the first electrically lit
Christmas tree was set up in the New York home of a friend of the inventor Thomas Edison;
it had 80 bulbs and cost a small fortune. Even when strings of lights were produced
commercially in 1903, they cost an average American's weekly wage. |
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