The twinkle that started it all: How electric lights changed Christmas

Twinkling from living room trees to neighborhood light shows, electric Christmas lights are so entwined with the season it’s easy to forget how new the tradition is - and how deliberate its beginnings were.The story starts with two familiar names: Thomas Edison and his colleague Edward H. Johnson. Edison, who perfected a practical incandescent bulb in 1879, is credited with stringing electric lights outside his Menlo Park laboratory around Christmas 1880, a publicity-minded glimpse of what electric illumination could do.It was Edward H. Johnson, however, who is commonly credited with the first electric Christmas tree inside a home. On Dec. 22, 1882, the vice president of Edison’s company “hand-wired 80 red, white, and blue light bulbs” and wound them around a revolving tree