Suburbia may bring to mind many things, but what you might not think of is that we can thank the creation of suburbs for holiday light displays on houses. In the 1960s, tract housing came into existence. The style of housing is rows of identical houses (cookie-cutter housing), which creates a suburb (fun fact: many credit Levittown, NY with being the first suburb.)

During this time, it became increasingly popular to outline the house (particularly the eaves) with Christmas lights. The concept now doesn’t seem so novel, but back then it was a fresh idea. Households had only just begun to use electric strings of lights to decorate their Christmas trees (as we learned in last week’s article). Technology was advancing fast.

After those original tract housing lights were set up, other houses caught on and strung lights not just on the eaves or outlines but on everything from windows to porch railings, and trees and shrubbery outside. After that, businesses began to have light displays, and now skyscrapers can be seen adorned with lights.

According to Wikipedia, “It is believed that the first outdoor public electric light Christmas Holiday display was organized by Fredrick Nash and the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce in Altadena California on Santa Rosa Avenue, called Christmas Tree Lane. Christmas Tree Lane in Altadena has been continuously lit, except during WWII, since 1920.”

Of course, nowadays, houses create bigger and better lights displays each year. Videos have gone viral of fantastic lighting, often set to go along with music (just Google it). You could even get famous for it. In 2005, a video of the home of Carson Williams went viral. The clip was widely circulated on the Internet showing a recording of one of his shows from 2004, accompanied by the track “Wizards in Winter” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. It garnered national attention. An urban legend even developed that it was not a video of an actual light display, but faked on a computer. Williams turned his hobby into a commercial venture, and was commissioned to create a 250,000-light display at a Denver shopping center, as well as displays in parks and zoos.

But where do all those Christmas lights go? Like much waste from America, it goes to China. Referred to as “the world capital for recycling Christmas lights,” the city of Shijiao, China receives more than 20 million pounds of discarded holiday lights each year. According to an article in The Atlantic, the region began importing discarded lights around 1990 in part because of its cheap labor and low environmental standards. As late as 2009, many factories would simply burn the lights to melt the plastic and retrieve the copper wire, releasing toxic fumes into the local environment. Luckily, a safer technique has been developed. Now, the lights are ground to a sand-like consistency, and everything is recycled. In fact, the materials are used to make slippers.