The first lighted Christmas trees were lit with candles. Attaching the candles was difficult, and proved to be a fire hazard. The pre lit Christmas tree could never be left unattended. A bucket of water had to be kept next to the Christmas tree and someone had to keep watch for a possible fire. Candle wax was expensive so lamps were made from nutshell halves filled with oil and a wick. More elegant lamps were made from different colors of glass. The new candle holder, called a counterbalance candle holder, had a weight attached to the bottom that kept the candle standing upright. Even with these improvements, Christmas trees were still fire hazards.

The invention of the electric light added a new dimension to the American Christmas. In 1882, an inventor working for Thomas Edison devised a way of wrapping small electric lights in red, white, and blue crepe paper. These colored lights were strung on a Christmas tree giving us the earliest version of contemporary Christmas lights. Christmas tree lights were experimental throughout the 1880s.

The miniature Christmas lights were conceived in 1895 by Ralph E. Morris, an employee of the new England Telephone Company. Morris's idea for lights occurred as he was looking at the tiny bulbs in the telephone switchboards. Select the following link to view our indoor Christmas lights.

Many Americans still distrusted the safety of electric lights in the early 1900s and candles were still used to decorate trees. The early Christmas tree lights were simply night-lights strung together to make the light strings. When General Electric commercially introduced Christmas lights, they caught on immediately. Edison Electric soon followed with an electric Christmas lamp.

In the late 1900's the introduction of the artificial hinged Christmas trees allowed tree manufactures to produce prelit artificial Christmas trees for the first time. Technical advances in the manufacturing process of the artificial trees has created easy to assemble realistic looking pre-lit artificial Christmas trees with Christmas lights already strung on.