They don’t make ’em like that any more: filament fairy lights
I’d hoped to sneak this post in before Christmas, but a nasty brush with
pneumonia held me up. Still, it’s not quite Twelfth Night, so it’s still
the Christmas season – traditionally, at least. In most of Europe, for
the last few hundred years, Christmas began at midnight on the 25th, and
ended at midnight on January 5th. These days, Christmas seems to start
some time in September, and finishes on Christmas Eve, when shops start
putting out Easter eggs.
Whether the loss of the conventional “twelve days of Christmas” bothers you or not, we should all be concerned about the loss of another great Christmas tradition: decorating our houses with filament fairy lights that mostly don’t work.
Almost more than anything else, Christmas is the season of twee lighting. Most of the buildings in my neighbourhood are festooned with little twinkly lights, sometimes shaped around reindeer and snowmen. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember: Christmas started when you dug the dusty, tangled ball of fairy lights out of the attic, and found they didn’t work.
Traditional fairy lights used 6-volt or 12-volt incandescent filament bulbs, arranged in series. That is, the bulbs were wired in a continuous string, with current passing from one bulb to the next. The whole string was powered by mains voltage applied at each end so, in Europe, you’d get 20 to 40 bulbs to a string, depending on the bulb voltage.
Of course, this series wiring meant that if any bulb failed, the entire string would probably go dark. There was no clear indication which bulb had died: you had to check every one. And any bulb could fail at any time, usually in a place you couldn’t reach. This tedious bulb-checking was a defining feature of my childhood Christmas, and it’s one of the things that makes National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation so darned funny.
If you were lucky, you’d catch the tell-take brightening or flickering that a filament bulb would exhibit, just before it blew. If you were even luckier, the bulb would fail to a short circuit rather than an open circuit, sparing the rest of the string. Eventually, fairy lights were designed to fail this way although, more often than not, they didn’t – they went open-circuit and the whole string went out.
Modern fairy lights use LEDs. They’re cheaper to make and run, they last forever, and they’re definitely safer. Most modern fairy lights run at 6 volts, provided by a transformer. If an infant pokes a sticky finger into the bulb assembly – which is usually impossible, anyway, because these systems are completely sealed – the low voltage significantly reduces the shock risk. Even if your unfortunate pet moggy bites through the cable, it might get a nasty tingle, but it won’t use up all nine of its lives in one go.
Modern fairy lights deny us the pleasure of familial problem-solving. There’s nothing like an evening of squabbling about who lost the spare bulbs, to bring a family closer together. We all had our theories about which bulbs were most likely to blow, and so should be checked first. For me, it was the blue ones. Nonsense, of course – failures were completely random, which is what made them so frustrating.
The reality is that modern fairy lights are superior to those of my childhood in every respect, except one: filament bulbs just look nicer. A lot nicer. There’s just something about the quality of the light, which isn’t lost even when they’re enclosed in coloured glass. LED bulbs, even the so-called “warm” ones, are still blue in comparison to small filament bulbs. Inexpensive LED fairy lights can flicker, in a way that is not directly perceptible, but can still be sensed. Incandescent bulbs generate light by heating, and can’t flicker – not until they’re failing, anyway.
Because of their incandescent nature, traditional fairy lights brighten gradually when they’re switched on; there’s a reassuring lack of urgency about this kind of illumination.
Now, I get it. Really I do. The poor energy efficiency of incandescent bulbs makes them completely inappropriate for full-scale domestic or commercial illumination. For all practical purposes LED lamps are better and, probably within the next five years, we won’t be able to buy anything else. While I far prefer incandescent lighting in my home I concede, reluctantly, that the need to manage our carbon footprint takes precedence over my personal taste.
But fairy lights?
They come out for a couple of weeks a year, and draw at most a few watts. That’s a tiny fraction of the energy required for – to take just one example – roasting a turkey. And, sure, LED lights are cheaper; but when was a British Christmas about saving money?
It’s sad that a whole generation of people have never had the pleasure of decorating their houses with real Christmas lights. If that’s you, I urge you to seek out a set of filament fairy lights while you still can.
And a big bag of spare bulbs, and a multimeter.
