As we swiftly approach the end of November...
oh, as December draws so near, it's here,
the holiday season is upon us.
And, as is tradition, many people will be stringing colorful electric lights all every which way.
Because why not?
And, as is tradition, this person makes a video about the awful state of Christmas lights
brought about by scientists who were so preoccupied with whether they could,
they never stopped to think if they should.
But before I launch into the tirade I've launched into half a dozen times now,
here's an actual Christmas light storage tip I learned from a teacher in high school.
When it comes time to put the Christmas lights away for the season,
don't use the tried and true
"wrap them around your arm like an extension cord and then shove it all into a Jewel bag" method my dad taught me
because that's bad.
Sorry, Dad, they just get way too tangled up and tend to break.
Instead, take a rectangular piece of cardboard and cut a slit into its side near the end of its long edge.
Cut at least two slits with one on each end.
Then, and this is very important,
start with the female end of a strand of Christmas lights and shove the wire down that slit.
Now, simply wrap the lights repeatedly around the cardboard until you're back to the male end, like so.
[a very high-pitched rendition of Entry of the Gladiators]
Okay,
now you can either stick the male end into the female end if there's enough room or
simply slide it into the other slot and you'll have a nice and compact flat thing
with all your Christmas lights on them.
If you do it this way, you will discover that they stack nicely into boxes while remaining completely tangle-free.
And so long as you remember to start wrapping with the female end,
they function as a decent spool when it comes time to decorate next year.
I am a full-on convert to this method of storing Christmas lights and wish to spread the knowledge.
So there you go!
And now back to my regularly scheduled tirade.
You see, I am old enough to predate the commercialization of LED lighting technology.
When I was a youngin', we were still mostly shoving electricity through tiny tungsten filaments
which caused those filaments to get incredibly hot such that they glow with a bright white light.
That's just how light bulbs worked.
And since the underlying technology produced a full spectrum white light output,
if we wanted to produce colored light, we'd need to use filters
which removed certain frequencies of light and only let some through.
This had two inevitable side effects:
One, the filtering wasn't perfect,
so the colors produced, while often quite intense and beautiful, weren't unnaturally pure.
It does not look, for lack of a better word, electronic.
Secondly, this filtering from a wide spectrum of light to a small sliver of that spectrum
reduces how much light escapes the bulb,
causing those colored lights to be much darker than their clear counterparts,
particularly the cooler colors on the shorter end of the spectrum, such as blue and green.
Now, I am fully familiar with that Douglas Adams quotation which says,
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works."
And while I'm sure there's some wisdom there relevant to my whole deal,
the part that follows about stuff which hit the scene in your teenage to early adult years being new and exciting
only sort of applies to me.
Because you see, while I absolutely love what the light emitting diode has done to make the world better,
it has made Christmas much, much worse.
Now, instead of decorating with warm and pleasant festive lighting,
we are decorating with horrid points of flickering saturated colors that belong in a gaming PC.
And not even, like, a good one.
Why is this?
Well, because LEDs are actually only capable of emitting light of a single wavelength.
This means they produce a single and very pure color.
Now, when it comes to white LEDs, there's some trickery involved.
Every modern white LED you'll ever see is actually a hybrid between an LED and, believe it or not,
good old fluorescent lighting technology.
The actual diodes produce blue (or as is increasingly common these days) a purplish near-UV light.
So to fill in the rest of the spectrum, a yellow dab of various phosphors sits in front of the diode
and converts the high frequency light it produces down to various lower frequencies
which cluster together well enough to trick our eyes and brains into thinking it's actually white.
We've gotten incredibly good at this.
While cheap and nasty LEDs are still on the market in the bargain bin,
any decent LED fab these days is capable of producing incredibly good white LEDs
that produce light which is nearly indistinguishable from an incandescent filament.
And of course, we're now able to embed the actual blue or purple diodes onto a substrate in such a way
that we can make very convincing mimics of incandescent light bulbs.
This is all innovation I'm 100% on board with!
And when people care, we can even do stuff like combine diodes of different color temperatures into a single product
for producing a fixture or bulb with a selectable color temperature.
Or, as is my favorite application,
automatically shifting the color temperature down as light intensity decreases
to mimic the warming effect of an incandescent bulb on a dimmer switch.
You can build that directly into a light bulb
which means you can use old-fashioned dimmer switches to control new fangled light bulbs,
and you don't even need an app!
Philips used to shove that tech into pretty much every kind of light bulb they sold,
but not enough people seem to notice how good of an idea that was, and now it's annoyingly hard to find.
Even their own website filter doesn't work.
You people need to start caring about lighting more than you do!
I'll rant more about that later, but back to Christmas lights.
While we have had the capability to produce extremely good white LEDs for a long time
and while the market clearly understands that there are lots of people who want the energy efficiency and long life benefits of LEDs
but who also want to have the aesthetics of old hot-glowing-wire light bulbs...
that memo just never gets received by Christmas light manufacturers!
Because year after year they end up putting Christmas lights on the market which look like these old ones.
Now, instead of taking a white light and filtering it down to various colors,
each light produces its own wavelength, which leads not only to oversaturated colors
but especially in the case of multicolored light sets like this, which have blues and greens,
overly bright colors which overwhelm the rest and result in a garish blue-green color palette, which,
while admittedly a matter of taste, I find to be the exact opposite of warm and inviting.
It's Christmastime, not the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance.
Now, the really frustrating thing here is that the solution to this problem is obvious!
Do what everyone already does with regular old light bulbs and make old-fashioned looking things using modern technology.
Produce Christmas lights with warm white diodes that then have a color filter over them
like we used to have to do with incandescent lights.
For years, I was making YouTube videos where I would buy cheap warm white LED sets of Christmas lights
and color them by hand with various materials to demonstrate that
A) this could be done and 2) it works reasonably well.
I was never completely happy with any of my various experiments,
but this was just a silly thing I did every year to hopefully prove a point and inspire someone with an R&D budget to take action.
And as many of you know, this is finally starting to happen.
A few years ago, I learned about Tru-Tone bulbs, the passion project of a designer who had the exact same bugbear as me,
but who actually bothered to do something about it.
True Tone started out making LED C7 and C9 light bulbs
which actually looked exactly like the incandescent bulbs they replaced.
And they are truly great products which I can personally vouch for.
I love them.
But they weren't making mini lights... yet,
so I just kept making the same video year after year.
Then last year, my friend Dan let me know about Vintaglow lights,
and these were almost perfectly argeted at me specifically.
This is my preferred color combo of red, yellow, green, and blue,
and they executed the idea much better than any of my experiments could.
I did have a few nitpicks, but well...
those have all been taken care of.
This is a set of generation 2 Vintaglows,
and they are a near spot-on perfect match to the incandescent light sets of my youth.
Also of note, for those of you who would prefer the more traditional five color combo, that's now an option.
Now, I do want to point out that in a dozen sets of my Gen 1 Vintaglows, I did find one where a strand lost a section.
I'm sure it's fixable, and each set included some spare bulbs, but it's probably going to be annoying to fix,
and I haven't gotten around to it right yet.
I might do that for Connextras but it'll be a couple of weeks.
But since so many of you know about my Christmas light opinions,
I tend to be alerted to the existence of new options on the market.
And this year there were a couple of developments worth sharing.
This puts me in a bit of an odd spot because I very much want Tru-Tone and the Vintaglow line from Merry Co to succeed as businesses.
But both of them are carving out a very specific niche
and that makes their products relatively unattainable both from a cost perspective and simply where to get your hands on them.
I've had correspondence with both founders now and have learned some very interesting things about the Christmas light industry.
It's clear that the actual creative direction which is producing these better lights is coming from them.
The biggest problem with Christmas lights today is that nobody at the big box stores who is in charge of ordering them for the year
really cares that much and simply takes whatever options the overseas factories that barf them out present to them that year.
But Tru-Tone and Merry Co are quite a lot more persnickety,
so I want to make sure they get the credit for sparking much of what has happened and I'm sure will happen in the future.
But I also get the sense that both of them will feel a sense of accomplishment
if the broader Christmas light market gets a little less... intense and a little more warm and festive. \So with that,
So with that, let's look at this copycat.
I was a little too late, as you might have been able to tell, getting this video started so I had to drive to a
pretty far away Target to get these and the only option were these net lights rather than simple strings.
But there now exists a Sylvania-branded "Traditional Glow" set of Christmas lights which are...
pretty good!
These appear to actually be made of glass,
so this is pretty much the best way to create traditional looking mini-lights with LEDs rather than filaments.
But the green...
the green's not great.
It's more like a jade or forest green than the emerald green I'm used to in Christmas lights.
Honestly though, that's really the only problematic color.
This is not my favorite color combo, in fact, it's my least favorite,
but it's a very standard one and I think most people buying these will be happy.
And it's a good sign that these are sold out already while there are plenty of other options still available in the store.
So perhaps signals will get to the appropriate people in charge of ordering Christmas lights for next year.
And speaking of sold out copycats, I was also alerted to this vintage option for sale at the Home Depot this year,
which is, as far as I know, the first copycat of Tru-Tone's Jewel Tone lights.
Now, this is as good a look as you're going to get.
I would have absolutely bought a set to compare them, but again, they were sold out throughout my area.
Which I will take as a very good sign.
People know this looks better, but haven't been able to get them until quite recently.
But while these are at least getting the concept correct, the quality of the color coating doesn't look that great.
The blue is extremely faded.
That might as well be a cool white.
Now, it's possible that it was a darker blue when this display was first switched on,
but if the color was able to fade that much in an indoor display, that doesn't bode well.
For comparison, this set of Tru-Tone Jewel Tone lights was outdoors for two seasons, and they still look great.
And now, a small diversion on nomenclature.
Of course I checked out my mostly Midwestern mega merchandise mecca, Menards, to see what they might have in store.
And I have one positive thing to say, along with several very negative things to say.
I got excited by the packaging,
which had been revised for 2025 and which was touting "classic incandescent glow,"
but that was just pure lies.
This is the same product I got my hands on last year, though I can't remember if there was a twinkling option or not.
I checked the steady version and it had identical colors and their clear colored C7s and C9s are just as horrendous as before.
So, whoever your supplier is isn't getting the memo.
Or else you haven't figured out how to write that memo yet.
So, what's my positive thing to say?
Well, Menards is rolling out the term "vivid" for some of their other multicolor options.
And I think they might have stumbled upon a great way to distinguish between monochromatic LED Christmas lights
for you freaks which like that for some reason
and the more pleasant vintage versions I'm yearning for.
They need to actually get their vintage line to look decent before I can really give them credit.
But I think vivid versus vintage is a good distinction.
Though I also think the "traditional glow" works well.
I'm starting to think a big issue with modern lighting
is that many people simply don't have very broad vocabularies to describe the qualities of light.
So, while they can describe something as looking off or harsh or unpleasant,
it can be difficult to communicate the specific reasons.
A simple distinction like "vivid" and "vintage" might be just the trick!
And now, a second diversion on color combinations.
For this video, I checked out a different mostly Midwestern mega merchandise mecca,
Meijer.
For those who aren't familiar with Meijer, which is probably most of you,
it's essentially Walmart but run out of Michigan by a different family.
Now, they didn't have anything really notable except they are still selling incandescent twinkling light sets -
branded as Phillips, oddly enough.
my first Christmas light video was about these things and I love them a lot, so I was happy to see them for sale.
And bought some, many more than two of them.
But then I discovered that the Philips-branded multicolored sets for sale at Meijer
were a color combo I haven't seen in the wild since I was a little kid.
Red, yellow, green, blue, and purple -
though you might call it magenta.
This is the color combination of my grandparents' Christmas tree, and it hit me right in the nostalgia.
And it also made me realize something.
In the past, I have said I want none of those purples or pinks.
But that's not strictly true.
I am actually completely cool with there being a fifth color so long as it's distinct from the rest.
That's why I don't like these sets with red, orange, and pink.
Those three colors are simply too similar, and it means you end up with what blurs into an orangey red mess
with scant pops of blue and green.
This combo swaps orange for a bright yellow, which actually stands out from red.
And rather than a pink, which is simply a lighter red, it has a true magenta between red and blue.
So, it also stands out as a separate color.
Here's a comparison between the more intense purple here and the paler pink of a more typical set.
I realize most of what I'm doing here is rationalizing a subjective opinion,
but I really do think it's important to have very distinct colors to make a pleasing combination.
I like the red, yellow, blue, green combo because each color stands apart from the rest.
But the much more common red, orange, pink, blue, green has three warm colors which all just smear together.
This five color combo with yellow rather than orange and purple rather than pink
manages to have five colors which are all very distinct from one another
and so the addition of that purple doesn't bother me.
In fact, I like it!
And since the multicolored twinkling sets also have that combo,
well, you know, I bought a bunch.
I put them in my tree this year, though, I will be honest, it might be just a bit much.
There is a thin line between Christmas cheer and tacky, and this is right up against it.
I'll see how my opinion changes once I get the ornaments on there.
So, there's really not a whole lot more to this video, but I want to circle back to Tru-Tone and Vintaglow.
If you're after the sorts of Christmas lights that I am, I would strongly encourage supporting their efforts directly.
I know the folks at these companies are the reason the situation is starting to improve,
and they're even more persnickety than I am.
I've purchased products from both companies and have been extremely happy with them.
Links to their store pages are in the description, though my tardiness means a lot of stuff is already sold out.
I'm not a very good Christmas lights influencer,
but I am apparently enough of a Christmas lights influencer to get the inside scoop on some new products they have in the pipeline.
However, once again, I'm in a bit of an awkward spot because True Tone and Mary Co are competitors.
I like what both of them are doing,
and since Merry Co focuses primarily on mini lights while Tru-Tone focuses primarily on C7s and C9s,
I feel like they complement each other quite well and you will not catch me picking favorites.
So, I will just say they both have some really cool new stuff coming which I am excited to see.
And if you've been afflicted with Christmas light issues similar to mine,
or perhaps even ones I don't have, such as a sensitivity to flicker,
I think it would be worth signing up for their newsletters.
They really are the epicenter of good nostalgic Christmas light innovation and are actually getting it done.
So kudos to everyone at both companies.
But I will take it as good news that other brands and stores are finally starting to get it.
Slowly but surely.
People genuinely want Christmas lights that look like this!
But you have to make it clear that it's something special and you have to have it on display and actually lit.
So many people have sent me hopeful things to investigate which turn out to be disappointments.
You can't just put the word vintage on the packaging and hope that'll work, Menards.
People can see what's wrong with modern Christmas lights, but they might not have the best words to describe it.
If some actual effort is put into creating a best of both worlds product, people will buy it.
But it has to be real effort.
These Sylvania lights are close, but there's a good distance to go.
And their white strands, while solidly above average, are still using quite cheap diodes.
This white is too pink and color rendering is poor.
Vintaglow proved last year that you can source these tiny little diodes with excellent light output.
Genuinely, their clear mini lights are incredibly good and nearly indistinguishable from incandescent.
But it takes a lot of work to keep overseas suppliers from cheapening out just a little too much...
and the big box stores don't seem too inclined to do that work.
And now I'm going to finish this video up
with an unscripted section where I talk about some of my other LED-related complaints.
I've written down a list of things to cover, and here we go:
We'll start with a call back.
"You people need to start caring about lighting more than you do!"
I meant two things by that.
First, we are now in a place where LEDs are so good and so efficient and so cheap
(as well as cheap to operate)
that overlighting your environment is very easy to do.
One of the reasons I don't like modern Christmas light displays is because they're just too bright.
No lights like this are very bright at all because these are bare filaments you are staring directly at.
This is supposed to be in your line of sight.
So, the thing you're looking at needs to be very dull. Otherwise, it's going to strain your eyes.
And a lot of modern Christmas light installations are horribly bright.
I got caught off guard by someone who decorated way before Thanksgiving on my drive home and, geez,
it was like they had a billboard in their front yard.
That's not good!
But it's not just Christmas lights.
One thing that has also happened is I think LEDs have changed standards people have for lighting in a largely bad way.
I've talked about this before when I made my video on switched outlets -
we are now very used to having central overhead lighting which is extremely bright.
And that means a lot of people these days will look at more traditional lighting environments where you have things like
table lamps and task lighting and complain that there's not enough light.
Whereas what I think is really the case is you've gotten used to very cheap and bad lighting.
I challenge you to figure out the difference between a single overhead saucer light and a bare light bulb hanging on a string.
It's not actually that different.
The saucer light is probably a little more aesthetically pleasing,
but the pattern of light that it shines in the room is almost identical to a single light socket on the ceiling.
And I think you would agree that's not good enough.
But because LEDs are now so bright, you can have enough light to see in the room with a single point of light.
And, uh, I honestly think people are just getting used to that, even though it's bad.
It's really bad.
One thing I've seen a lot of people complain about is hotel rooms because hotel rooms generally don't have overhead lighting -
and they might have a light by the entrance to the room and then lamps throughout the room.
I think that is actually a much more pleasant environment.
But again, when you're used to having a single overhead light that illuminates the entire room from the center,
oh well,
then the room can look underlit.
But I would challenge you to change your mindset to ask,
"Well, what actually needs to be lit?"
Here's a great example:
I changed the light fixture above my dining room table to this.
Not only because it's mid-century modern in a way that I very much like,
but these light fixtures only direct light down.
The previous light fixture had the bulbs able to shine in all directions, which meant the room was very, very bright,
but it also meant I was looking at light bulbs when sitting at the table.
This fixture, by directing light only down at the table, creates a very moody environment.
There's almost no light hitting the walls at all, unless I turn on my accent lights.
That's the sort of stuff I would really encourage more people to be cognizant of and to play with.
Lighting impacts your environment so much,
but if all you want is enough light to see, you're probably going to end up with environments that are very harsh and very overlit.
But continuing on that train of thought,
there is a weird twist which I think has happened as we have made daylight balanced lighting available.
I no longer get that hung up on people who claim to prefer daylight balanced lighting -
I still say "claimed to" because of what I'm about to say -
But I am increasingly convinced that the people who prefer daylight lighting
(in some contexts - I'm not going to say you can't prefer it)
but I'm increasingly convinced that a lot of that is because if you have had an underlit environment before,
like for example, you lived in a house which had a single boob light in the center with two 60W bulbs in there,
then the only thing you have experienced with warmer lighting is badly lit and underlit environments
and if you swap those warm lights for daylight balanced light your visual acuity will go up.
So I think something that has happened is there's an some combination of un -
I don't want to say unawareness but poor awareness of the virtues of task lighting and directed lighting
and having more sources of lighting in your home than just a single overhead light
and not recognizing that it's not the color temperature that makes that environment look underlit,
it's the fact that there isn't enough light in enough places.
What I'm trying to say here is that LED lighting technology has freed up a lot of new ideas,
but it has ended up changing our expectations in what I would say is a bad way.
One of the things that we still have is wattage equivalents.
We still look at light bulbs and say that's a 60 watt equivalent or a 100 watt equivalent.
And that's because it was, in the incandescent days, a fairly consistent amount of light output per watt.
And now that LEDs have broken way beyond that level of brightness,
I think it's just quite easy for us to expect brighter lights in the same location
rather than expecting more lights spread out to have a more pleasant environment which is more evenly lit.
I'll just put it like that.
How am I doing for an unscripted section?
I'll tell you, I don't think I'm doing pretty great because my next thing is a thing I already talked about.
But to reiterate I guess
I really feel like people these days are less interested in replicating certain kinds of lighting,
like using additional lamps or directional light.
And this has resulted in a lot of overlit environments, which is changing people's idea of what enough light is.
One example, there's a house that I drove by that was built in the last couple years and they've got some exterior eaves lighting,
like uh basically can lights in the eaves and my god,
they are just way too bright!
There's way too much light being fired out of these eaves of this house and it looks horrendous.
It does not look good.
But I really think more and more people are just expecting cannons of light now that the LED can do that for us.
But maybe we shouldn't.
And for another great example of just because you can doesn't mean you should,
if you haven't already run across these, there are now really convincing LED alternatives to neon tubes.
And I'm talking like traditional neon signs made of bent glass tubes.
I'm a little sad for what that's doing to the neon industry,
but it's a lot easier to work with and you don't have to deal with blowing glass, etc.
However, so many of these products, while they look great,
are way too bright!
It's as if nobody who makes them has ever seen an actual neon sign.
And the trouble with making it brighter is that, especially when you think of something like a neon sign,
the contrast is against a dark background, the night sky.
And if you have something with an ornate shape which is being illuminated, if it's too bright, you can't read it.
There's a lot of new Christmas decorations that are coming out that have that sort of LED neon look to them.
And the thing is, they're so freaking bright that if you have them outside, you're never going to be able to tell what that is.
Like, uh, I've seen a Santa head, which is just going to look like a red and white blob from any reasonable difference*
They only look correctly illuminated in already very bright environments.
So, this is what I mean about the LED is great because it means we can make really bright lights
in really small spaces, but it's so easy to go overboard.
And I wish more people were thinking about that as a possibility.
And for my last LED hot take,
this is something that is more vibes based than anything else, but I wanted to bring it up.
I truly believe that when you have too much freedom in design, this can be a bad thing.
One of the things that the LED is letting us do now
is create these incredibly interesting light fixtures and whole new kinds of light fixtures which are very cool.
But when you have that completely unlimited freedom,
sometimes you end up making a lot of stuff that looks cool but isn't very functional.
Whereas on the other hand, when we used to have to design around standardized light bulbs,
that led to a lot of really interesting creations.
And so in a sense, I am truly bummed by what the LED has done because it's now so cheap, so easy, and so reliable
(for the most part)
that we have made some really visually interesting things that just don't actually work that well as light fixtures.
And uh I've had this thing going on where I feel like a lot of sectors of the economy and industries etc.
are losing their sense of purpose.
And I think that the LED is a great example of that where now that we have brighter, faster, cheaper, stronger,
we just do that rather than thinking about what would actually be a really good application for this technology.
And thus explains why it's taken 10 years for someone to do this at a mass market scale.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, that's the end.
I didn't write anything for the outro either,
so hopefully uh the music is fading pretty well.
I think we're going to do that jazzy We Wish You a Merry Christmas I typically do on these videos.
And I guess the only thing left to do is to cut the black.
♫ a jazz version of We Wish You a Merry Christmas ♫
just like I promised!
...and string it - shove it more appropriately.
[laughs]
...better, so long as you remember to start wrapping at the female end,
then they become a nice and functional spool...
And you'll notice on this one, I did not remember to start at the female end.
[angry sigh] Or did I?
No, I did. I just got tangled up.
Wait, did I?
No, I did not. Darn it.
Here, watch watch me do it again because last year me made a boo boo.
Which is why I am being very...
...I did - I did this on several of these and that is why I am making sure I point out start with the female end
or you will regret it.
They glow with a bright white light.
That doesn't work
[laughs]
which caused those filaments to get so incredibly hot they glew with a bright white light.
Glew? Heh.
So here's a fun fact:
I wrote this end-of-video captions gag in the middle of Kansas.
Just passed a billboard advertising an "Old Fashion (sic) Soda Fountain"
This isn't what you were expecting for an end-of-video captions gag, huh?
Well, me neither.
Merry Christmas!