A Brief Pictorial History of Electrified Christmas Trees

The lit-up Christmas tree is one of those traditions that seems like it should stretch back to the beginning of time. Its twinkling lights are now ubiquitous and certainly predate my birth. But I’ve never seen a good exposition of where and how and when the industries that surround it — Christmas tree farms, distributors, tiny stringed light bulb manufacturers — came into being. And I’m not going to give you one in this post, either, seeing as it’s Christmas morning, but there are beautiful pictures here of some of the oldest trees out there.

We know that it was only three short years after Edison made the light bulb workable in 1879 that Edward Johnson, VP of Edison’s company, lit up a tree — this one in Detroit. That’s it over there on the right. It doesn’t look like much to me, but a contemporary observer raved, “I need not tell you that the scintillating evergreen was a pretty sight—one can hardly imagine anything prettier.”

He goes on to describe the tree:

It was brilliantly lighted with many colored globes about as large as an English walnut and was turning some six times a minute on a little pine box. There were eighty lights in all encased in these dainty glass eggs, and about equally divided between white, red and blue. As the tree turned, the colors alternated, all the lamps going out and being relit at every revolution.

One thing to call attention to is that the word “blink” didn’t seem to have come into common usage. Instead, he has to write “all the lamps going out and being relit at every revolution.” Indeed, the word blink comes from what your eyes do — not what the light does — and so you see electricity here changing the agency of the word from your eyes to the mechanized tree.

In any case, two years later Johnson, now President of Edison Electric, improved the tree and went on tour with it to New York, where the Times reports that Johnson had quickly patented the blink:

The mechanism by which the shifting [i.e. blinking] of the lights is made has been patented by Mr. Johnson, who believes that its use will be invaluable in scenic effects. The changes can be made with clockwork regularity, while the field for combinations and effects is almost unlimited.

This commercial thrust went hand-in-hand with Christmas Trees. They were the leading edge of electrification: showing the wonder of illumination.

“Electric tree lighting was not to be truly practical until the first sets of pre-wired sockets, then called festoons, were introduced to the public by GE in 1903,” oldchristmaslights.com notes. “The General Electric Company tried to patent the idea of a Christmas lighting festoon, but the patent was refused.”

To the people of the time, lights in trees are incredible. That’s because previous sources of illumination were flames, right? To put a whale oil lamp into a drying tree would have been a recipe for disaster. What better way to show how safe electric lights were than to show them performing admirably in a previously severely hazardous situation.

Here, we read a snippet from an interview with a textile worker in North Carolina conducted in the 30s but describing a time long before. The light wasn’t just beautiful, it was terrifying:

I’ll never forget how scared I was when Pa took me to the first Christmas tree there in our little church. That tree just jumped at me as I went in, it was so bright and wonderful; the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. When my name was called to come up for my gift it about scared me to death. ‘Stead of going on up like the others had, I just clung to Pa’s legs and wouldn’t budge. Pa had to go up with me, holding on to my hand, and was he out done.

In any case, a few short years later, we find this amazing picture of a Christmas tree boat loaded at a Chicago dock.

Next thing you know, electrified Christmas trees are everywhere. Here, a bunch of children stand in front of a Christmas tree that (apparently) had floodlamp ornaments. (1926)

The White House had one (1920s?), and so did the Edison Electric Institute (1940):

Here an old farmer, Myron buxton, interviewed in 1939, tells about the business in Springfield, Mass:

I was down to Springfield selling Christmas trees at Christmas time. My sons and I have been cutting trees and picking evergreen for wreaths for some years now in the winter time. You know that’s a big business up here in the hills. Most everybody takes a hand in cutting or hauling trees and fixing wreaths for sale. I heard one of the summer visitors here say once, ‘You folks are a crowd of Santa Clauses. How wonderful.’ I guess she wouldn’t say it was so wonderful if she had to bend her back picking evergreen all day out in the woods when its mighty cold. But then, its not a bad business, and it fills in at the off season. We used to send our trees down to New York City to sell, but that’s too much of a haul to make any profit on these days when times are bad and people don’t buy so many trees. The past few years we’ve been selling our trees at a gas station down to Springfield. I go down to help sell the trees and I can tell you I don’t like the work.

Around this same time — the late 30s — we find this photo of a group of unemployed workers with a scrawny tree to keep them company.

All images courtesy of the Library of Congress, except the first electrified Xmas tree, which I found at Oldchristmastreelights.com.

1. Grant Park (1914)

2. The first lit tree (1882)

3. A house in DC by Theodor Horydczak (1937)

4. Chicago Dock (1909)

5. Kiddies in front of the power tree (1926)

6. The White House tree sometime in the 20s, most likely.

7. The Edison Electric Power Institute’s 1940 tree.

8. Xmas trees for sale in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, December 1940.

9. Hobos at East 12th Street in New York in 1938.