Holiday Displays

Winter '10 019

Most years I like to add a few holiday decorations to the inside and outside of my house. Typically I will use the traditional lights to decorate areas inside and outside along with some evergreen branches, a few wreaths, and maybe some birch branches if I have access to them. This year, however, I used a few braches from our Christmas tree to decorate one container outside and also covered other areas that house plants and annuals during the summer and a couple of wreaths that the kids decorated. That was it. I guess there was less motivation to do anymore since many years we have holiday celebrations but this year we didn’t host any.

As I was reflecting on my lack of holiday decorating I began to wonder how all of this began. What was the motivation for someone to begin decorating for this holiday season. Apparently this idea of decorating for the holidays all began in Germany with using candles to decorate Christmas trees. I recall learning about early Christmas tree decorating but didn’t connect this to our outdoor décor. Once electricity was invented, the use of colored lights outside was first used by a theater to promote the opening of an opera. After that, businesses started to use this practice which eventually made its way into our homes. If you’re interested in learning more details go here….

It is very intriguing for me to think about starting out with attaching candles to evergreen trees (I can only image the number of fires that must have caused) to using thousands of colored lights placed all over our streets, businesses, and houses. These lights are now used in animatronics and set to music. After going through some videos of holiday decorations on YouTube, it’s difficult to not get inspired to decorate more.

 

Holiday Lights