by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Tomorrow from Noon to 4, the Homestead hosts its annual Holiday Open House, with displays in the Workman House including interpretation of Christmas celebrations from the 1840s and the 1870s, spanning the late Mexican and early American periods, and at La Casa Nueva, with a great deal of focus on 1920s decorations.
In the latter’s Living Room, where the Christmas tree stands, there is, on a sofa, a group of original period electric light strands and boxes for visitors to enjoy. This is contrast to the trimmed (albeit, artificial for safety reasons!) tree in the Workman House, on which are candles and next to which, on the floor, is the requisite bucket of water.
In this newest “The Evolution of Christmas” post, we look at some early examples of the use of electric holiday lights in Greater Los Angeles, spanning the period from 1908 to 1913, which was an area of more significant growth in the region and as Christmas became an ever-greater commercially focused holiday.
A Library of Congress web page titled “Everyday Mysteries” notes that Thomas Edison, inventor of the electric light bulb, also devised the first string of lights, setting up a display in 1880 outside his famed laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey. Two years later, a business partner, Edward H. Johnson wired by hand 80 blue, red and white bulbs and put them on his Christmas tree, which had the added advantage of revolving on its stand.
The page points out, however, that, because of safety concerns, it took years for the idea of electric holiday lights to catch on, though President Grover Cleveland asked for the White House Christmas tree to be decorated with hundreds of lights and this spurred more interest broadly. Still, anyone wanting lights on their tree had to hand-wire them or hire an electrician to do and they were very expensive (it would cost $2,000 in current money to light a typical tree!).
In 1903, General Electric made the first pre-made kits, but it was another fifteen years before Albert Sadacca, a teenager whose family owned a firm making novelty lights, convinced them to sell electric Christmas lights. This led to the formation of the Sadacca family’s National Outfit Manufacturers Association, or NOMA, and this trade association, later the NOMA Electric Company, dominated the electric light market for decades—our La Casa Nueva exhibit features NOMA boxes and light strings.
The Old Christmas Tree Lights website notes that, when GE was formed in 1892, it acquired Edison’s patents to light bulbs as well as factory. Eight years later, Scientific American, in its 28 November 1900 issue, published the first advertisement, from GE, for the availability of electric Christmas lights, these being either for sale or rent. When GE offered its pre-made kits in 1903, they did so with strings of 24 sockets and, two years after that, Underwriters Laboratory (UL) issued its first certifications for safe light sets, from GE and Elbright.
GE introduced its MAZDA brand name in 1909 (derived from the Persian Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda) and, the next year, it began changing its pear-shaped bulbs to round ones. In 1912, tungsten filaments, first used in electric bulbs a half-dozen years prior and more consistent and longer-lasting, became the standard rather than carbon filaments, though the new type was not commonly used until about mid-decade.
An early mention of electric holiday lights in greater Los Angeles is from an advertisement by the Boston Dry Goods Store, later best known as Robinson’s department store, from 8 December 1908, in which readers were advised,
We are agents for electric Xmas lights—21 lights on [the] string, each on an independent service, giving the effect of candle light without danger—and can be used in table decorations—$10 a set.
The promotion of electric lights as less dangerous was a comparison to using candles, even as they was a general fear of fires from electric lights and wires, as well. As to the $10 cost, some inflation calculators state that this would be around $360 in today’s currency. In its ad, Robinson’s prices plush animal toys at 25 and 50 cents, albeit discounted by half, as well as hobby horses on sticks at 50 cents and a dollar, and kindergarten desks at $10 and $12.
In its 21 December 1910 issue, the Times reported on a holiday party held by Major and Mrs. John H. Norton, at which ferns and poinsettias decorated a hall and reception room and “ices were served in Santa Claus molds, and as they were brought in, the lights went out and from every available nook and corner blazed a beautiful Christmas tree with colored lights.”
The Nortons could afford the expense of electric lights and were clearly in the upper echelons of Angel City society, as guests included the prominent downtown developer William May Garland, while receiving party members included the spouses of banker General Adna R. Chaffee, rancher and business owner Isaac Van Nuys, lawyer and judge Cameron Thom, attorney and former City Council member Stephen C. Hubbell and opera singer Mamie Perry, known as Mrs. Charles Modini Wood and who was the grandmother of actor Robert Stack.
The following day’s edition of the Long Beach Press Telegram addressed changing Christmas lighting technology as it informed readers,
The day of the dim flicker of the elaborated candle or taper on the Christmas tree is fast passing. In its place has come the safer, saner electric light, and a tree can be made all aglow with one turn of a switch and cotton necessary to represent the snow-laden branches may be used without fear of ignition.
The paper added that innovation was such that there was the novelty of having electric lights that so resembled the old method of illuminating the tree that “at a few feet distant they can not be told from the ordinary candle.” The Towne Electric Company, on 1st Street, “are showing a chain of three lightings that are out of the ordinary” because “in place of the candles are tiny images with the electricity within, making a transparency of them.” With eight lights on a string, one was a Santa, another a cupid and the next a globe adorned with holly, while “following these are vari-colored and shaped lights, all of which could brighten a tree and add to childish pleasure.”
On Pine Avenue, the King Electric Company exhibited another type of figural bulbs, include those in the shape of apples, lemons, oranges, pears and quinces. It was added that the firm’s offerings “are very popular and beauty to the tree,” while it also sold electric toys or those that were operated by batteries. Close to the Towne shop, the Long Beach Electric Company, aside from such novel items, sold “table and portable electroliers that are a comfort to read by, with one usable at the dining table.
The Pasadena Star included in its want ads section a brief one that a “costume for Santa Claus and Christmas tree cluster lights for rent,” this latter echoing what was said above about early strings being available that way, as well as for sale. The Long Beach paper, in its number the day after Christmas, observed that “the Christmas spirit was rampant” as “more Christmas trees were sold than ever before.”
Also mentioned were lighted windows and that these “formed picture frames for paintings of tall, symmetrical trees that included “fluffs of pink and white tapers burning in their glittering standards on every branch.” The account, which reiterated the growing use of Christmas trees with each passing year, also discussed a prominent oceanfront Long Beach landmark as it was remarked that,
Down at Hotel Virginia an immense Christmas tree blazed out its tale of cheer and blossomed with lights that symbolized the old Norse legend of a Christmas tree whose lights no gale could extinguish. A wealthy guest at the hotel acted as Santa Claus and distributed the gifts.
It was also recorded that the hotel staff “had a Christmas tree all their own, a dance afterward and a vaudeville performance in the Dining Room,” this taking place a couple of days before the holiday. The hostelry, which opened in 1906 as the Bixby Hotel, named for the family that acquired, from Jonathan Temple for 50 cents an acre, the Rancho Los Cerritos, and which was renamed the Virginia two years later, closed in 1932 as the Great Depression worsened and, following severe damage from the following year’s Long Beach earthquake was razed. Today, a modern glass-walled office building occupies the site.
In a quarterly review of operations from the Pasadena Star-News of 12 March 1912, it was recorded that the Pasadena Day Nursery offered Christmas dinner to its charges, this paid by two Sunday School classes and “likewise a tree, incandescent lights and candy and presents in abundance.” The account added that some of the children in the nursery were taken to the municipal hospital “for a few days when necessary to tide over a troublesome time,” so it was clear that the nursery took in children of straitened circumstances, making the holiday cheer even more important and meaningful.
Speaking of services for the less fortunate, the late 19th and early 20th centuries were periods in which settlement houses, operated by volunteers from the Protestant and Catholic faiths, provided a wide range of programs and services for poor immigrants, including Asians, Europeans and Latinos, the latter being the largest group especially during the Teens and Twenties when México was riven by revolution and the economic, as well as political, tumult of those periods.
The Los Angeles Tribune of 7 December 1912 included an article concerning a facility situated in a working-class section of downtown Los Angeles just east of Chinatown (now Union Station) and near where the county jail is now situated. The piece shared with readers that,
The vital question of the hour in the neighborhood of Bauchet street, where the Coleman House association has its settlement, is, “Can we afford a Christmas tree for the children?
Anxiety on the subject obsesses Miss Margaret Stark, housewoman of the settlement, and causes her moments of acute perplexity when asked by big-eyed Italian babies and olive-skinner mother, “Will the Bambino [the infant Jesus] give a tree with lights?”
“Suppose I promise them a tree and find I cannot get one for lack of funds!” said Miss Stark yesterday, and the fearful responsibility of the case was apparent to the least sympathetic listener.
The hope of the president, Mrs. J.E. Coleman, and every worker in the cause, is that not only a tree, but trappings and toys and above all, [American] flags will be provided out of the bounty of Los Angeles . . .
Americanization, which largely involved steering immigrants from the customs of their home countries and into the lifeways of their adopted land, was a crucial component of these institutions’ operations, so that it was remarked, “the keynote of the settlement work among the foreign children is love of country” so that each should receive a flag “from the first Christmas tree” they see.
Remarkably, the account then asserted that,
Christmas without enough to eat, without shoes or stockings, is nothing in the eyes of a child compared with Christmas without a real Christmas tree, shining with sparkles and hung with dainty useless muslin stockings full of candy and all manner of toys.
The account concluded that girls from a Sunday School program called Philathea (or Lover of Truth) were “banding together to make the muslin stockings and contribute what small gifts they can” and that “fruit and candy have been promised by members of the [settlement] association and donations of every sort of Christmas cheer, in however small quantity, will be received for the children” at the Bauchet Street house, located where that thoroughfare meets Avila Street, this next to the wide range of railroad tracks that now enter to and leave from Union Station.
As for the sale of electric Christmas lights for the 1912 Yuletide season, The Electrocraft Shop on Second Street (in what has long been the Pomona Mall) in that city advertised, in the Pomona Times and the Pomona Bulletin, its offering of “Nice, Clean, Useful Gifts” including multiple sets of lights and assorted colored lamps, which were said to be “the safest light for Christmas trees.” Prices were from $6 for a seven-light string to $18.50 for 28 lights—those inflation calculators mentioned above indicate the latter amount would be about $618 today! The store assured readers,
We have them for any size tree. Festoons of Green Silk Cord—Junction Box—Attachment Plug—Green Sockets, and assorted Colored Lamps. Nice, new, neat, safe and clean. Wired so if one light burns out the rest will burn anyway. Something you can keep for FUTURE USE.
In its 21 December number, the Los Angeles Express ran an ad from the Woodill and Hulse Electric Company, located at Main and 3rd streets, which proclaimed “This is an Electrical Age—Be Up-to-Date, Make it an ELECTRICAL CHRISTMAS, Use Electric Christmas Tree Lights.” The firm informed readers “on account of delayed shipment (received only yesterday), we have cut prices exactly in half—the factory standing the loss.”
This boon to customers meant that an 8-bulb set was knocked down from $5 to $2.50, while sets of 16, 24 and 32 bulbs were sold for only $4.25, $6.00 and $7.50, though it should be noted that the inflation calculator tells us that the last amount is $250 in 2025 money. Woodill and Hulse called the unexpected sale “an opportunity of a lifetime—[the lights] can be used year after year.” Conveniently, the ad included an image of the exact size of the bulb (noting that the base was painted green to blend in) and a rendering of what they looked like on a Christmas tree.
With this look at some early regional references to electric Christmas lights, we’ll come back tomorrow after our Holiday Open House and illuminate you further with examples from the period after 1912, so be sure to check back with us for that.