On 22 December 1882, Edward H. Johnson, a vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company, hand-wired 80 red, white and blue bulbs onto a Christmas tree in his New York parlor and set it turning on a revolving box. A reporter from the Detroit Post and Tribune came by and wrote about the “continuous twinkling of dancing colors.” It was a publicity stunt, really. It was also the first electric light installation most people had ever heard of.
Holiday lights have been drifting toward art ever since, sometimes on purpose. Here’s how that happened, and where to see the good stuff now.
From luxury to the front porch
For decades, electric tree lights were a rich person’s thing. Most homes weren’t wired, and nothing was standardized. In 1903 General Electric sold the first strings of prewired sockets, a 24-bulb set for $12, which IEEE Spectrum puts at roughly $325 now. They were wired in series, so one dead bulb killed the whole string. Anyone who has stood in a cold garage testing bulbs one at a time knows that problem never fully went away.
Prices fell, colored and figural bulbs arrived from Austria, Germany and Japan, and lights moved from the tree to the windows, the eaves and eventually the whole yard. That’s where the art question starts. Once light leaves the parlor, it’s working at the scale of architecture.
Lyon got there first
The best evidence that this is a real tradition, not a marketing season, is Lyon. On 8 December 1852 the city was meant to inaugurate a statue of the Virgin Mary beside the chapel on Fourvière hill. Weather pushed the ceremony back. Residents lit candles in their windows anyway, and the habit stuck. Families in Lyon still set small candles in glass holders, called lumignons, on their sills every 8 December.
In 1999 the city turned that into the modern Fête des Lumières, a four-day festival in which artists and lighting designers take over facades, squares and parks. We like this origin story because it shows the instinct clearly. People wanted to change how their street looked at night, together. Lighting designers just made it bigger.
Amsterdam, Brooklyn and the Australian desert
Amsterdam’s Light Festival began in the winter of 2012 to 2013 and runs for about seven weeks from early December, with commissioned works placed along the canals so you see them by boat, bike or on foot. Its eleventh edition, themed Imagine Beyond, included Peter Vink’s Brug 242, a light work on a bridge over the Amstel that moves as the bridge rises and lowers, and UxU Studio’s Inversion Waterfall, light that seemed to run up the side of the NEMO Science Museum and pour upward into the water. One honest note from a critic who went: the boat views can be cramped, and walking is often better.
Dyker Heights in Brooklyn is the opposite model, no curator, no theme. Lucy Spata and her husband moved there in 1986, found the neighborhood plain at Christmas and started decorating. She has said she went bigger the next year to keep her mother’s memory alive. Neighbors joined in, and now the blocks along 83rd and 86th Streets, between 11th and 13th Avenues, draw crowds every December. Is it art? It’s maximalist folk art at the very least, and a lot of it is joyful in a way that tasteful lighting rarely manages!
And then there’s Bruce Munro. The British artist first sketched the idea in January 1992 while camping near Uluru, and about a decade passed before he built a first version, in a field behind his home in England. At Uluru the Field of Light became 50,000 slender stems, each topped with a light, spread over more than 49,000 square metres and powered by 36 solar panels, the first solar-powered work he’d made. Its Pitjantjatjara name, Tili Wiru Tjuta Nyakutjaku, means “looking at lots of beautiful lights.” It isn’t a Christmas display at all! But it’s what every ambitious holiday yard is quietly reaching for.
What the good ones have in common
Put Johnson’s tree, Lyon’s windowsills and Munro’s field side by side and a few things repeat. The best light work has one idea, not ten. It respects the dark around it, so there’s somewhere for the eye to rest. And it’s tied to a place, a canal, a hill, a desert, a particular block in Brooklyn.
Where we land is that a house covered in lights isn’t automatically art, and it isn’t automatically kitsch either. It depends on whether somebody made choices. The 1882 tree was three colors and one movement. That’s still a pretty good brief.
For more light that works as art, see Sydney’s Vivid festival, a forest of yellow light you walk through and James Turrell’s rooms of color.
