Edward Johnson, one of Thomas Edison’s assistants, invented electric fairy lights in 1882, dressing a tree with 80 small bulbs. By 1902, his invention was being mass produced. While most western households have a special box in the loft marked â€Christmas tree lights’ you might be surprised to find just how spectacularly diverse the range of fairly lights commercially available today actually is. If that loft box contains a tangled mass of ageing cable and burnt out bulbs, you’re missing out on a new generation of decorative lighting which can transform your home †not just at Christmas, but all the year round. String lights remain a very popular variety of fairy light †but the kitsch designs, gaudy colours and temperamental bulbs of yesterday have given way to a superb new age of LEDs (light emitting diodes). Not only are these lights vastly more reliable, they last nearly twice as long as their filament predecessors, give a more brilliant glow and frequently come with multiple effects. You can alternate at will between a steady glow, flashing, flickering, waves, pulses, fading and blending or a mix of all them. And you have a far better range of colours to choose from than you did in the past, from brilliant white to ice blue, cranberry red to mistletoe berry white, to spangled, multi-coloured incandescence. The Christmas tree is today only one of the items you might wish to decorate with lighting. Icicle or string lights can also be tastefully garlanded around the stair-rail and even stair spindles if you have them, or draped around the frames of wall-pictures or mirrors. Curtain, net or icicle lights can also adorn your windows, from the living room to the kitchen to the front door. Or try wrapping a spiral of string lights around the curtain rail. And battery lights transform that stylish bundle of tied twigs in the corner of the hall or that large parlour palm in the living room into a luminously bejewelled objet d’art. If you have a large glass vase, or a decorative bowl, a string of brilliant white LED lights on a bed of glass beads will transform it into a beautiful feature you’ll not want to be without when the festive season ends (use lights with white or translucent cable though †green cable is too prominent and spoils the effect). Increasingly, people are keeping some of their fairy lights on display all the year round †only the specifically festive (the icicles along the soffits or the Christmas tree illuminations) are sent into hibernation in the loft or basement until next Yuletide. Along with being decorative, fairy lights have increasingly become functional as well. With lighting like this, you’ll forget about ceiling lights and table lamps: the soothing and classy ambience decorative fairy lights can produce is always enchanting, subtle and uplifting. No longer just for the holiday season, these lights can give your home a festive feel all 365 days of the year.
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