I love Christmas like a fat kid loves cake.
So it pains me to admit this year, I kindof hate our tree.
Specifically, the lights.
We switched to all LED lights this year for our tree, and (as I suspected they might be) they are aesthetically hideous.
The thing I love about a beautiful Christmas tree is turning out the regular lights, and basking in the warm glow it casts over the room. The light catches the sparkle of the ornaments and plays up the shadows and bright spots through the green branches.
LED lights just don’t do that. Their output is so low that they barely illuminate themselves, nevermind things around them. They are eerie, otherworldly pinpoints, distracting and ruining an otherwise beautiful and charming centrepiece of holiday decor.
Instead of the tree casting a warm glow over the room, the room is dim and dark, and reminiscent of an after-hours office, lit by the glow of a computer monitor someone accidentally left on. The ornaments are completely lost. The tree looks like a bushy blob.
These fucking lights are ruining my Christmas.
I am very tempted to rip these POS lights out and re-do the tree with the beautiful incandescents that actually look like Christmas. But since this is a cut tree, that’s just a disastrous mess waiting to happen.
But you’d better believe these lights are going straight on Craigslist the instant Christmas is over this year. I’d throw them in the trash outright, if they weren’t also so bloody expensive. Though I kindof want to anyhow, just as an extra Fuck You to this failed attempt at environmental friendliness.
I’ll probably just buy a festive, Christmas Lamp to offset the creepy factor in that room. But you’d better believe it’ll have an incandescent bulb, bitches.
The white LED lights look so blue. I noticed at Canadian Tire they had white LED lights that were meant to look “true white”. Maybe those would be better? I totally hear you about the glow of a Christmas tree… the tree and a gingerbread house are a couple of my favourite Christmas rituals. I’m a multicoloured-lights-on-the-tree kind of person and I’m hoping my LEDs look ok… I’ve got an old back up string of incandescents just in case.
So the multicoloured LEDs looked awful so I returned them and bought incandescents. Way better.
Ok, last comment I swear. Just exchanged all the multicoloured lights I bought for white incandescents. I’ve been converted. 🙂
December 13th, 2010 at 9:05 am
Yes! White incandescents FTW!
I teach environmental politics. I have very strong environmental conscience. But I can’t help but totally applaud you for this post. Damn LED lights. Give me my white incandescents.
I hate the LED lights too; we are on our second attempt with LED lights for our house (I still have my old incandescents on the tree inside). The second LED attempt is better than the first, but I am still not loving them. Glad to hear I’m not the only one. I try to be environmentally conscious: we use the reusable bags for any shopping, recycle everything, and put reverse-osmosis in at home to stop using bottled water (our tap water is total crap in San Diego). Christmas lights are up for such a short period of time…I draw the line at that!
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Glad to see I am not the only one hating LEDs. I don’t go ‘Griswold’ on my house, but try to light it up for my kids; all the bushes in front, each window, etc. Last year, I got rid of my icicle dangling lights for a 60′ strand of leds for the front stretch. I also bought nets and other strands. Wow – what a POS these ba$tards are, not to mention how much $ I spent on them! And, they have no warmth! It’s like going to a concert and instead of holding the lighter, you are holding a flash light – and led flash light! I think I am going to trash them next year… I have to admit, at least they all lit when I took them out of the container! Sometimes I wonder if the gov’t made the incandescent light strands. Put them away and they are all working; the next year open the box and half are out!