“What’s going on here?” asked Charlie Brown to Snoopy in one of the best Christmas specials of all time, “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” “What’s this? Find the true meaning of Christmas? Win money, money, money? Spectacular, super-colossal neighborhood lights and display contest? Lights and display contest? Oh, no! My own dog has gone commercial. I can’t stand it! Oh!”

But Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without some colorful glowing electric wonderment adorning homes, shop windows and trees along downtown streets.

Prior to strings of electric lights, Christmas trees were decorated with candles, an obvious fire hazard that often led to home fires.

In 1879, Thomas Edison filed a patent for the first electric lamp with a carbon filament. Although people had been experimenting with electric lightbulbs for several decades, Edison’s invention made the idea practical, burning long enough to light a home for many hours.

It didn’t take long for a creative mind to see the potential for lighting up Christmas trees with this new invention.

Just three years after Edison’s patent filing, Edward Johnson, a friend and business partner of Edison, developed the idea of stringing lights together, hand-wiring 80 red, white and blue lights for a tree in New York City.

People were still cautious about the use of this new technology, however, so it wasn’t until 1895 when President Grover Cleveland and First Lady Frances Cleveland requested lights on the White House tree that the idea started to gain acceptance.

But the concept was expensive, costing more than $300 in today’s dollars for a string of 24 lights, leaving the option for the very wealthy who could afford not just the lights but installers to handle the management of the electricity.

In 1917, another businessman with an entrepreneurial spirit, Albert Sadacca, saw an opportunity to create an affordable option for the general public. Through his family’s novelty lighting company, strings of lights became a holiday classic, with their business, which evolved into the NOMA Electric Company, capturing much of the market until the 1960s.

Since that 1917 introduction to a mass market, Christmas lights have come in all shapes and sizes: safe outdoor bulbs, bubble bulbs, the C7 and C9 bulbs of the 1950s, flickering bulbs, icicle lights, net lights, fairy lights and the more recent invention and widely used LED lights.

This article from the Dec. 22, 1950 issue of the Estes Park Trail, predecessor of the Estes Park Trail-Gazette, announces the annual lighting contest in Estes Park. It sounds like the prizes barely covered the cost of the lights at the time, but Christmas light displays are never about the cost.

They bring joy and wonderment to people of all ages with a childlike admiration to enjoy colorful displays of cheer and good tidings.

If you are interested in seeing more archived issues of the Estes Park Trail-Gazette, peruse through decades of scanned copies at https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/. Issues are available from 1912 to 1993.