The Innovators Alliance team would like to wish you a happy holiday season!<\/p>\n
Families are participating in their favourite holiday traditions at this time of the year: hanging stockings, decorating the tree, lighting the menorah, playing dreidel, and exchanging gifts.<\/p>\n
But traditions are never set in stone. They evolve over time, and throughout the years we\u2019ve seen many innovations around the tradition of decorative Christmas lighting.<\/p>\n
If we go back to the beginning when Christmas trees were first introduced in 18th\u00a0century Germany, people used candles and lanterns to light up their trees.<\/p>\n
In 1879 Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, but what many people don\u2019t realize is he also came up with an innovative use for it \u2012 the world\u2019s first outdoor display of incandescent Christmas lights<\/a>.<\/p>\n Just two weeks later, his colleague Edward H. Johnson had the idea to hand-wire a set of red, white, and blue electrical light bulbs and string them around his family\u2019s Christmas tree. In 1903, General Electric introduced the first Christmas-light kits to the public and decorative Christmas lighting took off in popularity.<\/p>\n But there were still more innovations to come! Eventually incandescent lights evolved into LED Christmas-lights, and people began stringing them up outside their homes. As outdoor and home light shows grew in popularity, they became more elaborate. In the early 2000s, computer-controlled lighting set to music was introduced and took off in popularity. Like this amazing one below:<\/p>\n