Fairy lights
No Christmas tree is complete without lights. Our first tree had a set, but they never seemed to work. These were fairy lights of traditional appearance, with coloured shades shaped like flowers, and were probably bought at the same time as the old artificial tree. I can remember our new kitten having the whole lot over at Christmas 1964, which was probably the last time those fairy lights worked. Felines notwithstanding, the big trouble with those old, cheap Christmas lights was that whenever a bulb blew – which was frequently – it would break the whole circuit. And we just never seemed to have enough spare bulbs to keep up. Today’s festive lights rely mostly on LEDs, which seem to last forever, although if you shop around you can still find examples of the old, unreliable sort, ideal if you’re after a retro look for your tree, but you’ll need to stock up on bulbs (I bought a whole spare set to use for replacements on mine).
In 1967, we finally got a set of lights that worked. Pifco were pre-eminent in the field of home electricals, producing all manner of items including hairdryers, fans and torches, and it was a set of their ‘lanternlites’ that we obtained from a local retailer at Christmas of that year. These were attractive lights, much brighter and more colourful than the original set, and they did pretty good service, lasting more than ten years.
Today, you can’t buy a set of Christmas lights without a plug/adaptor, but back in the 1960s, those Pifco lights came with bare wires on the end. Our dad wired them into a bayonet connector, which we then plugged into the socket on a standard lamp. This still strikes me as a curious arrangement, and it persisted even after the lights were upgraded. This happened around 1980 when I found a new set of more elaborately styled lantern lights in our local branch of Woolworths’. We ended up with two sets of them – there were twenty lights in a set, which wasn’t quite enough for a five-foot fir tree. The two sets were wired together and were still working until around ten years ago: I hunted them out to use on my first ‘retro tree.’
Working sets of vintage Christmas lights are much sought after: at time of writing there’s a fully functioning set of Pifco lanternlites on eBay, and I’d be tempted if it weren’t for the fact that the final price is likely to be steep. There’s also the issue of reliability: any set of 1960s Pifco lights that’s still working today has probably seen scant use over the years, and I doubt they’d get through a single season. They require coloured bulbs of the screw-in variety, which are getting hard to find, push-in bulbs having largely replaced them.
This set is absolutely identical to the ones we owned, right down to the packaging, which I can remember like it was yesterday. As the image shows, the lights came in five colours: red, yellow, green, blue, pink and purple. In operation, the pink and purple lanterns were hard to tell apart from the red ones. Multi-coloured lights were all you could get – the trend for all white (or red, blue, or whatever) wouldn’t come until much later.
One thing these old lights definitely didn’t do was flash – today, it’s a job to actually stop Christmas lights from flashing, with most LEDs offering a whole menu of different programmes. Back in the 1960s, Christmas lights only flashed when there was a loose wire somewhere, and ultimately after being left on for hours at a time over Christmas, they would burn out. It was always a matter for speculation as to whether or not the Christmas lights would still work when they were brought out for another year, and we would inevitably end up going through the set, tightening every bulb until – bingo – they all came on. Or not, as the case may be.
They were also designed specifically for home use, but that hardly mattered: in 1960s Britain, no one decorated the outsides of their houses, except maybe a few ostentatious types who happened to have a decent-sized fir tree in their front garden. Anyone wishing to do so would have needed a proper set of professional coloured bulbs of the type used by councils to decorate shopping streets, whereas today almost all LED lighting sets seem to be fit for use indoors or out.
There’s one other point to be made while we’re on the subject of fairy lights. Once upon a time, fairy lights were just for Christmas (unlike the proverbial puppy). I remember seeing a set around the bar counter of a guest house in Llandudno in the late sixties, and it struck me as unusual for anyone to have Christmas lights on display when it wasn’t Christmas. Today, plenty of pubs seem to have permanent displays of fairy lights dotted about the place, and there’s been a trend in home décor for bunches of twigs and skeletal trees with fairy lights attached. I even discovered a battery-operated set wound around a pergola in my garden and left there by the previous owner, but they could never be made to work. Not that I’d have used them if they had – to me, fairy lights are still specifically for Christmas.
So, we’ve got the tree, we’ve got the lights – what else do we need?
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