Before Christmas trees bubbled, they burned.
For generations, if you wanted little points of light glowing among the branches, you used actual candles. Small candles were fitted into holders and clipped right onto the tree—which was beautiful, festive and, in retrospect, an alarmingly optimistic thing to do with a dry evergreen.
By the early twentieth century, electricity was beginning to rescue Christmas from quite so much open flame. Electric tree lights appeared in the 1880s, although at first they were expensive novelties. Gradually they became easier to buy, brighter, more colorful and considerably less likely to require a bucket of water standing nearby.
And then, in the years after World War II, somebody apparently looked at the safe electric Christmas light and thought:
You know what this needs? Bubbling liquid.
Enter the bubble light.
They looked a little like the candles Christmas trees had once carried—an upright glowing tube rising from a decorative base—but instead of a flame at the top, something far more fascinating happened inside.
You had to wait for it.
The light came on.
Nothing.
Then one little bubble appeared.
Another followed.
And suddenly a bright stream of bubbles was climbing through the glass tube.
If you grew up with them, you probably remember that turning on the Christmas tree wasn’t quite enough.
You watched it wake up.
When Bubble Lights Escaped the Christmas Tree
Once people discovered that watching little tubes of glowing liquid bubble was oddly entertaining, there was really no reason to leave them on the Christmas tree.
Manufacturers apparently came to the same conclusion.
By the end of the 1940s, bubble lights were beginning to turn up in decorations of their own. Royal Electric produced cheerful molded Santa and snowman figures that actually held bubbling lights. Some were sold as Christmas decorations; others doubled as night-lights.
Which meant you no longer had to stand beside the tree waiting for something to bubble.
You could have a snowman doing it on the other side of the room.
There were lighted centerpieces, too. One 1949 Christmas-light set came in a cardboard sleigh-shaped holder that buyers were encouraged to reuse on the table. Light it up as a centerpiece, the instructions suggested—or fill it with nuts and candy.
Christmas decorating had officially begun wandering away from the tree.
Over time, the bubble light became less a particular kind of tree bulb and more a Christmas effect all its own. Bubbling candles appeared in tabletop decorations, figures, night-lights and other holiday displays.
And it makes sense.
The little glass tubes already looked like candles. They glowed. They moved. They came in wonderfully unsubtle Christmas colors.
Put one in Santa’s hand and apparently nobody was going to object.
If anything, the appeal was exactly the same as it had been on the tree: you didn’t merely turn a bubble light on. You watched it.
Still Bubbling After All These Years
Bubble lights were never the most practical Christmas decoration.
They took time to warm up. They were made of glass. The old ones contained liquid you definitely did not want spilled across the carpet. And somewhere along the way, manufacturers decided a perfectly reasonable place for one was in the hand of a glowing plastic snowman.
None of that hurt their appeal.
Maybe it helped.
There was something about switching on the tree and waiting for those first bubbles to begin. One light would start, then another, until little streams of color were moving through the branches.
For people who grew up with them, bubble lights became tangled up with everything else Christmas tends to collect over the years: the same ornaments coming out of the same cardboard boxes, tinsel that somehow followed you into January, cookies cooling in the kitchen, and decorations that were brought out every year simply because Christmas would have looked wrong without them.
And they’re still around.
Modern bubble lights can still be bought today, while vintage sets continue to turn up in old Christmas boxes, antique shops and collections. The technology may be wonderfully old-fashioned now, but apparently there are still plenty of us willing to sit and watch a tiny tube of liquid bubble for no sensible reason whatsoever.
Some Christmas traditions survive because they’re beautiful.
Some survive because they’re meaningful.
And some survive because, after nearly eighty years, it’s still surprisingly difficult to look away from a bubbling Christmas light.
Keeping Christmas bubbling since… well, a long time.
One More Rabbit Hole
There is, naturally, a much more complicated story involving early bubbling advertising displays, competing inventors, NOMA and a patent fight that reached federal court.
If that sounds like your particular kind of holiday rabbit hole, you can read more about the bubble-light patent case here:
Read the 1950 court decision
If not, that’s perfectly all right too. You already know the important part: someone figured out how to make a Christmas light bubble, people loved it, and nearly eighty years later we’re still talking about them.
Which is a pretty good run for a tiny glass tube full of hot liquid.
Because apparently even Christmas lights can come with legal drama.
Everyone else may proceed directly to the cookies!