PHOTO: Festive lights shine along Commonwealth Avenue. Photo by Howard Sholkin
This weekend offers the best opportunity to check out how various homes have lit up with holiday spirit.
And Community Kangaroo, a kid-friendly events listing website, has made a map to help you find a bunch of dazzling light displays in Greater Boston.
“While gathering December events near Newton and Needham for our kid-friendly event calendar, we kept coming across outstanding holiday light displays that deserved a map of their own!” the Community Kangaroo website reads.
The map they made is extensive. And if you sign up for their newsletter, Community Kangaroo will send you a detailed list of light displays by community. There are a bunch in Newton.
While you’re on their site, you can find lots of family-friendly events and activities to enjoy with the kids over the holiday break and beyond.
Christmas lights have probably the most interesting origin story of all the standard Christmas decorations.
Edward Hibbard Johnson, an associate of famous inventor Thomas Edison, came up with an idea to use Edison’s electric lightbulb invention to add some dazzle to his Christmas display in downtown Manhattan, according to Smithsonian Magazine, in 1882.
Adding lights to a Christmas tree was nothing new. The first recorded Christmas trees with lights (candles) were displayed in Germany by Lutherans in the 16th century. Some stories credit Martin Luther himself, while most credit a Lutheran minister in Strasbourg, Germany, in the 1530s. Today, the Strasbourg Christmas Tree remains a marvel to behold every year.
Anyway, back to New York 1882. Christmas trees were gaining traction in the United States, and Johnson decided that Edison’s lightbulbs—which were expensive and weren’t going to be mass-distributed for a while because electrification was so limited in America—would add unprecedented oomph to a Christmas classic. He strung 80 red, white and blue lightbulbs around the Christmas tree in his parlor, and passersby marveled.
The press stopped by and reported on this novel idea, and over the next decade Christmas tree lights caught on. President Grover Cleveland put the first electric Christmas lights on the White House Christmas tree in 1894.
And today, it’s hard to imagine a holiday season without light displays.
Happy Holidays, Newton!