LED Christmas lights - not very cheery are they?

Rocker

Something about the light quality from LED Christmas lights does not hit the gold circle.  The light quality is cool, very few are multicolored which are not too bad considering, the white lights do not spread any Christmas cheer IMHO.  The older fairy lights were much warmer in colour and did what they were supposed to do.  It seems that in the mad rush to reduce power consumption, certain elements, like Christmas cheer, of Christmas lights are deemed unnecessary. Sod off bureaucrats and give us back our traditional fairy lights.  The lights that we grew up with. 

WezV

I say bring back candles on the tree

WezV

Everyone likes a house fire at Xmas

simonk

First world problem.

Bridgehouse

Could be worse...

FX_Munkee

You know what I miss? The plague. Weren't we all cheerier when we knew our chances of seeing next Thursday were slim.
And the community spirit, remember that? Dividing up everybodies meagre belongings as they died.
I blame vaccinations, it's just not the same nowadays.

Phil_aka_Pip

We had 2 kinds when I were a Kid. There were the little tiny ones 20 to a set so they'd have been 12V each and they were clear glass with a little plastic flower at the base where the bulb screwed in. Then there were the big set which were 12 to the set so they'd have dropped 20V each. They were painted glass and about the size of your thumb. I remember them from (probably) 1960 and in the early 70s we still had some originals but others had been replaced by naff modern ones. Those old big ones were amazing. Especially them that were shaped  like victorian lanterns and painted with red, gold and green (rasta style??).

The glass baubles were amazing as well. The colours were so deep and even the shiny silvered glass looked as it it were several inches thick - but it was eggshell thin and highly fragile. No wonder dad used to try to stop the cat from playing with them! 

Sassafras

We had little candle holders that clipped onto the branches so we could have real candles lighting the room with their warm flickering glow.
Of course, that was before the Health & Safety Nazis took over.

simonk

Anyway, Pifco Fibre Optics were where it was at.

richardhomer

I remember when it was all just fields....

Rocker

richardhomer said:

I remember when it was all just fields....

You mean grass and hedges, rabbits and flowers!  Wow! That must have been amazing.  Where did they park their chariots?

axisus

I disagree. The old lights were rubbish. They got hot, were potentially dangerous, they would all go out because one bulb blew and it was hard to find the problem one, the spares always got lost. I remember my dad stuffing silver foil in instead of a bulb to get them working. LEDs are bright, colourful, can flash, never blow. Million times better.

TTony

Rocker said:

LED Christmas lights

How do you know?

It's not "Christmas" yet.

I think you're probably talking about LED early-December lights.

Rocker

Ah yes @axisus, LEDs are bright, colourful, can flash.... You left out the bit where they can cut the eyes out of your head with glare. The only good thing about them is that they work. Probably. 

Unrelated but but in a similar vein, I saw a street hawker selling boxes of Christmas lights on the streets of Dublin today. Sets of 1600. Yes you read it correctly, 1600. All white lights. Why??..

thermionic

We have LED christmas lights because global capitalism allows China to sell them to us cheap. If you're going to blame anything, blame neoliberalism, not bureaucrats.

Rocker

As I understand it @thermionic, the bureaucrats have deemed that we must reduce our carbon emissions. Hence LED lightbulbs. The Chinese are only supplying the market created by the bureaucrats.

BRISTOL86

I really don’t like the uber-bright multicolour ones that seem to be all the rage these days like this



Give me a nice warm clear light anyday (cat sold separately)




Old style lights with the pointy flower shaped plastic collars were the bomb however and evoke a massive sense of nostalgia

Phil_aka_Pip

Rocker said:

Unrelated but but in a similar vein, I saw a street hawker selling boxes of Christmas lights on the streets of Dublin today. Sets of 1600. Yes you read it correctly, 1600. All white lights. Why??..

So you can put them all over your house, American style

Grunfeld

When my boys were young I had an Aussie patient or client,
who gave me a little Christmas wombat to hang on the tree
But the wombat's eyes fell off so I drew a big pair of stoner eyes and a comedy nose on the little fella - he was like our special Xmas wombat.
My kids loved it; my missus hated it.
But it's just really nice to know
that although I've not seen my ex since the turn of the century
apparently that wombat is still on her tree cos the boys won't let her throw it away and insist "it''s part of Christmas"
And there's a bit of Christmas which is about dumb stuff like this.
Memories of lights; memories of wombats.

EricTheWeary

Sassafras said:

We had little candle holders that clipped onto the branches so we could have real candles lighting the room with their warm flickering glow.
Of course, that was before the Health & Safety Nazis took over.

We had some of those. To the best of my memory we never actually lit the candles but they’d get clipped back on every year, many of them broken in half as they’d been put back in the box badly. 

ICBM

If your LED lights don’t look Christmassy, you bought the wrong ones. Mine are really nice - 80 lights in four warm colours, can be set to constant light, various stepped patterns or ‘twinkle’ (my favourite), work reliably, and aren't a potential fire or shock hazard.

So much better than the old twenty cheap 12V bulbs in series connected straight to the mains, which had about a 50% chance of playing find the dead bulb every year. Bearing in mind that one wire in the holder is live at 240V when you find the dead one...