Electric lighting for Christmas trees first became widely available to the public in the early 1900s. Those early products were experiments both in electrical engineering and in marketing approaches. Today's collectors of the early lamps and of related materials are taken with both the sheer variety of products and the audacity of the manufacturers' claims.

Between 1999 and 2008 the "Old Christmas Lights" and "Antique Christmas Lights Museum" web sites recorded and illustrated the history of these lamps and the businesses behind them. Unfortunately, the last and most complete iteration of these sites unexpectedly shut down in early 2010. Many of the sites' files were lost immediately. This site is an attempt by the editors of Family Christmas Online™ to restore and preserve as much of the surviving material as possible for future readers. To that end we have invested hundreds of hours rewriting code, reformatting photographs and otherwise restructuring things to make this material available to the widest possible audience.

If you have any comments, corrections, concerns, or questions about these pages, please contact us through our Contact page. We now return you to the site's content (or as much as we've been able to reload so far).

Please note that the site authors Bill and George Nelson collected and catalogued the lights and related products shown on these pages - they did not sell them, and we don't either.

As George often said, "Thanks for stopping by."

Update for April, 2012 - The good news is that in addition to this archive of George's 2008 site, we now have archives of two versions of Bill's original site:

• Tom Elmore's painstaking reconstruction of the 2003 version of Bill's site

• Fred Fox's archive of Bill's original 2001 site.