LeRoy Pennysaver & News

LE ROY PENNYSAVER & NEWS - DECEMBER 13, 2020 by Lynne Belluscio In the window of the upstairs children’s room is one of our historic trees. It’s trimmed with decorations and lights - - electric lights. We don’t know when the first tree in LeRoy was decorated with electric lights. Probably in the late 1920s. NOMA, (National Outfit Manufacturers Association) started selling strings of colored Christmas lights in 1927, but this was just before the Depression, and most folks wouldn’t have invested in electric lights. Certainly, the price wouldn’t have been a problem for Donald Woodward. In our collectionwe have a photo of his niece, Connie sitting in front of a huge Christmas tree in 1933, at his house on East Main Street. But many folks in the country didn’t have electricity until the Rural Electrification program brought power to the farms later in the 1930s. Early string lights were wired in “series” not “parallel” which meant that if one bulb didn’t work, the whole string went out and it was a long tedious process to find the blown bulb. NOMA introduced parallel wired lights in 1934, but they were expensive, because they required a different type of bulb. Growing up in the 50s, we still had the old type of lights, and Christmas was a stressful time for my father, who I remember going out on Christmas eve to buy more bulbs so the tree would be lit for Christmas day. (I should add, that in those days, our Christmas tree went up late Christmas eve after I went to bed. Because not only did Santa bring presents, he also brought the tree! Christmas morning was truly a glorious event.) Bubble lights were invented in 1945 by Carl Otis, an accountant for Montgomery Ward, and NOMA started selling them in 1946. NOMA was the leading manufacturer of Christmas lights until 1965. This was about the same time as GE introduced the “Merry Midget Lights” that took over the Christmas light industry and NOMA filed for bankruptcy in 1967. By 1978, most Christmas lights were not manufactured in the United States. Glass Christmas bulbs have another history. F.W. Woolworth, the great five and ten cent store merchant, made a substantial part of his fortune by importing glass ornaments from Germany. In the fall of 1880, Woolworth saw glass ornaments in a Philadelphia Store. Next season he made a large order of ornaments, which sold out in a couple of days. In 1890, he traveled to Lauscha, a little German town in the mountains where hand blown ornaments were made in the homes of the villagers. He bought more than 200,000 ornaments to sell in his stores back in the United States. In the 1930s the political situation in Germany forced Americans to think about moving the glass blown ornament business to the United States. Many of the German glass blowers had already come to American and were working for Corning Glass Company. In 1939, Corning adapted their “ribbon” glass blowing machines which made light bulbs, to make Christmas balls. In December of 1939, the first 235,000 Corning ornaments were shipped to Woolworth’s The Corning machines could make more ornaments in a single minute than a glass blower could make in a day. (A few years ago, I made a hand- blown Christmas ball at the Corning Glass Museum. Pretty neat experience!) A few other inventions that contributed to the Christmas tree. The ornament hook was invented in the early 1890s. And “icicles” (which we always called tinsel), were first made and sold in Nuremburg and were made of silver. Tinsel was popular because it sparkled in the candlelight, but it quickly tarnished. Some tinsel was made from aluminum foil and France was the leading manufacturer of tinsel until World War I. Tinsel made of lead foil, became a great novelty in America and most Christmas trees in the 1940s and 1950s were festooned with lead tinsel. But in the 1960s, some people became concerned with lead poisoning and in 1967 lead tinsel was banned in the United States. Manufacturers developed silver colored Mylar and the Christmas tree became even more of a plastic creation. I was married in 1966, and our first tree had lead tinsel and I saved every last bit because I hated plastic tinsel. Each year, the old lead tinsel goes on my tree, and each year it is carefully removed. The bundle of tinsel has gotten small over the last 55 years but I brought in about 30 strands to put on the tree at LeRoy House. I remember for a couple of years, that some people decorated their trees with spun glass “snow” which was terrible, because you would get strands of glass slivers in your hand. Most people at this time, kept their trees up until Twelfth Night. On January 6, 1946, 700 people gathered at the athletic field behind the old high school on Trigon Park for the Twelfth Night celebration organized by the LeRoy Rotary Club. The Boy Scouts from Troops 21 and 23 collected all the Christmas trees from the village and piled them high. The LeRoy Gazette noted that the stadium was filled to capacity. The weather had turned warm and it was quite balmy. Rev. Beyers from the Presbyterian Church talked about the Twelfth Night traditions and how the English celebrated the Epiphany and the arrival of the Three Wisemen in Bethlehem. The Rotary President, Arthur Freeman, led everyone in singing “America” and the Village Mayor, Walter Davis, lit the pile of trees with a torch. As the trees burned, folks sang Christmas carols arranged by Sid Horgan and led by Shirley Luther, joined by the Youth Choir from the Presbyterian Church. Fire Chief Joseph Lapp had arranged for a fire truck to be on standby. As the fire dimmed, everyone sang “God Bless America.” The “Electric Tree”