My Lights

Christmas lights are wonderful things and bring a lot of joy to the darkest month of the year with the amount of light in a day diminishing until the 21st and then slowly increasing. The earliest sunset is before then and the latest sunrise after because of the Earth's elliptical orbit and the tilt of the earth in relation to the elliptical which is the plane of the sun and planets rotation.

Christmas lights come in many different levels of effort and beauty. On the small side we have houses with one singular set of lights, then the quantity of lights increases with houses with many hundreds of lights which catch your attention as you walk by. Then we have the houses (or streets) that go above and beyond and are defined by being featured on slow news days. Then as I will write most about is the Christmas lights put on by gardens and places of interest that will (sometimes) charge an entry fee because of the cost of buying so many thousands of lights and other special effects.

When you are fortunate enough to go to one of these amazing “Christmas shows” you are met by not just strung around fairy lights but designed and curated with not just lights but also music and catering for more senses. Some things that really impressed me are lights (and water features, fire or video) synchronised to music. With lasers moving and shining with mostly only the beam not the destination (often in the sky) being visible. These are amazing experiences which get you into the Christmas mood.

The amount of electricity used by these lights across big and small installations must be enormous. And the operators at the national grid, I presume, will have to account for the slight increase in power needed when these lights and other effects are turned on. Whilst these will be approximately 0% of the total electricity required, the grid needs to be very finely balanced and supply needs to basically match demand.

When do you remove Christmas lights? Some people say 12 days after christmas. The 12 days of Christmas whilst the concept is well known the actual days they fall on and whether the days are before or after Christmas are also widely unknown. Some people think the lights should stay up until the end of January (but it is a minority) with almost all lights being taken down and stored for next year in the first 15 days of January.

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