Annual museum holiday display de-lights

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This article was published 03/12/2021 (1644 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An annual holiday display with a twist has returned to the Manitoba Electrical Museum.

All That Glows: Then & Now features holiday lighting from the 1800s to present day and explores how Christmas decorations have been revolutionized since the introduction of electricity.

All That Glows has been running for almost a decade and is the museum’s best attended event. Pam McKenzie, museum administrator, said the exhibit explains the history of the type of tree and decorations.

“It takes a week to set everything up,” she told The Sou’wester. “We start on a Monday morning and work all day just to set up the trees and big stuff, then I work with volunteers throughout the week on decorating and fine-tuning.”

When it isn’t the holiday season, the museum keeps the lighting and decorations at an off-site storage facility. It takes six pickup trucks to transport everything back.

The exhibit starts in the 1880s, before the creation of electricity and when they used candles and dried fruit — including apples, oranges and cranberries — to decorate holiday trees.

“This was also when the tree skirt was invented, because they would put cotton underneath the tree to catch the wax drips,” McKenzie said. “We’ve done away with candles, but we’ve kept the idea of a tree skirt from the Victorian period.”

In the 1920s, McKenzie said, the big thing in holiday decorating was “figural lights,” which were glass bulbs in different figurines. Metal tinsel was also introduced in this period.

The 1950s saw the creation of “bubble lights.” When heated up, the liquid inside the light bubbles like a lava lamp.

“The early lights, because people were used to candles, they thought lightbulbs had to be shaped like that,” McKenzie said. “They also had something called a ‘berry bead,’ which you put on the tree because they thought the light had to be upright to work like a candle.”

Trees also became bristlier in this era, and lights included reflectors to bounce the light off the tree and reflect some of the heat.

“We also have popcorn, a more natural ingredient, on the tree,” McKenzie added. “It was something inexpensive and easily accessible.”

The 60s, or the “space age” as McKenzie called it, introduced aluminum trees with colour wheels set on the ground to illuminate the foil needles and brightly-coloured bulbs.

“Then we go into fiber-optics in the ‘90s, and the 2000s with different coloured trees and lights,” McKenzie said.

The exhibit also includes vintage lights across the eras, with original boxes and string lights — once fabric rather than today’s plastic — left on display.

The exhibit is open Tuesday to Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is $5, but children five and under get in for free.

Group tours are also welcome by appointment.

More information can be found at www.manitobaelectricalmuseum.ca