Getting Lit at Xmas

I learned my lesson last year with those awful blue-tinged “white” LED lights that I strung around the front porch post. This year it was back to good old-fashioned light bulbs.

Drive around town and you’ll see many more people using the LEDs. To me, their cold and steady glow feels sterile.

With incandescent bulbs, you’ll pay more for electricity, but they’re dirt cheap to buy. We’re talking $2.50 per hundred at Lowe’s. There are 2300 lights on that tree in this picture, so you do the math.

On Long Island, America’s headquarters for good taste and style, Newsday finds that the debate rages on, but I’m with this guy:

Keith Buerkert of Island Park, another Christmas-light fanatic, is turned off by LEDs.
“I’m still using the regular lights because I don’t like the way the LEDs shine,” said Buerkert. He has almost 12,000 incandescent lights in his display, he said, and runs a side business installing lights for neighbors.
“I don’t like the [LED’s] color. They’re not as bright as the others,” Buerkert said.

It would be goofy to romanticize something as trivial as a tiny light, but strip away the heat of an incandescent bulb, the brightly burning and fragile filament that glows hotly in the night, and you really take a little something out of Christmas.

Just call me goofy.

6 thoughts on “Getting Lit at Xmas

  1. The NY Times gets in on the act:

    Somewhere along the way, white lights came to represent a sort of sophistication; one need only behold the acres of white-only lights blanketing Fifth Avenue in recent years. (Rockefeller Center has it both ways: the big tree is drenched with multicolored lights, but the smaller ones surrounding it have white.)

  2. I figure I’d have to keep on sets of LED lights for the equivalent of an entire year to get back the “energy savings” vs. the more obvious decorative stylings of good old filament lights.

    Besides LED sounds great as an acronym but when you spell out it out – light emitting diode – it sounds like a medical treatment. I’ll side with goofy and trivial.

    1. I am interested in seeing LED’s that will replace standard household bulbs — and subsequently get rid of the compact fluorescents.

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