COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Are yours up? Mine aren’t. Soon though. Speaking of Christmas lights, I’ve gotten a couple of requests to reprise “The Complete Guide to Hanging Christmas Lights,” or “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

We may do that at some point, ideally before Dec. 25, but there are important new developments in the tiny little light department that cannot wait.

Remember, patience is a virtue — you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes, you get what you need.

I didn’t write either of those. Mick Jagger wrote the second one, and I don’t know who wrote the first one.

Christmas lights, like so many other things, are going green: not green as in color, but green as in eco-friendly.

If you want to light your cave and save the planet at the same time, you have two choices — LED lights and solar lights.

LED means “light-emitting diode.” I could explain it to you, but you wouldn’t understand. It all has to do with semiconductors and electroluminescence and how they work with, well, other stuff in a certain way, sort of.

The important thing is that they use a fraction of the energy of conventional, incandescent lights, which is good for Mother Nature and for your pocketbook, even though no one says pocketbook anymore, which makes sense when you think of it because why did anyone ever call a purse a “pocketbook” anyway?

LED Christmas lights are a bit more spendy than conventional lights, but you’ll feel really good about yourself and you’ll save a few bucks on your electrical bill, which will make you feel even better about yourself.

If you want to be greener than green, which is really green, solar-powered Christmas lights are the cat’s pajamas, which makes even less sense than “pocketbook.”

Solar-powered lights are just what they sound like. They convert sunlight into an electrical charge and store it to power the lights when the sun goes wherever the sun goes at night. The system isn’t perfect, but then nothing is.

Solar lights use replaceable or rechargeable batteries to help things along on those days when the sun is a no show or for those folks who live on the eastern coast of Maine, where anything above 60 degrees is a heat wave.

Solar lights use as close to zero energy as you can get, which is really a small number, but they are definitely pricier than conventional or LED lights.

All this talk about Christmas lights makes me wonder though — who started this? Who was the first person to stand in the front yard, look at the house and say, “Wait, I got it! Let’s get a bunch of lights and hang them from the roof. This will be so cool.”

I wish I had an answer for you. But I failed, miserably. I am so embarrassed.

About a thousand people, places and things claim that they were the first one to start draping the whole place with little electric lights.

The first electrically lighted Christmas trees? Piece of cake, except they were trees, which are bigger and taste awful, unless you’re a beaver, in which case they’re not bad.

Outdoors, the first mention of Christmas trees twinkling electrically was in San Diego in 1904, then in New York City in 1912.

Indoors, the first electrically lighted tree is easier to nail down. It belonged to Edward Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison and a vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company.

On Dec. 22, 1882, Johnson invited friends and colleagues and a few reporters into his stylish home on New York’s Fifth Avenue to watch him throw the switch on the first electrically lighted tree.

Apparently, most people were under-whelmed, especially the reporters. For people who didn’t happen to be a vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company, which was almost everyone, affordable Christmas lights, indoors and out, weren’t available until the 1930’s, which is when they started to catch on, slowly.

After that, nothing, zip, nada, bupkis. The cone of silence is lowered until the 1950s when the whole place goes wild with outdoor lights on eaves everywhere, even a few Adams.

Here is my theory, which is only a theory, so don’t repeat this to anyone.

Even though outdoor lights were available in the 1930s, I have to think that World War II shut down the idea of putting lights on your house real fast.

With everyone totally stressed about air raids and all the “blackout” rules, I assume the last thing the Civil Defense folks wanted to see was every other house lit up like a Christmas tree, so to speak.

I have one wimpy, weak offer of proof for my theory. Every collectable set of Christmas lights I found on the Internet said either “1950s” or “circa 1955,” etc.

And that’s about it, I think. Solar-powered lights, light-emitting diodes, and Edward Johnson’s lonely, misunderstood little tree, which got no respect whatsoever and was 70 years before its time. I say light the place up, in a green sort of way. It’s a strange habit but I like it. Then again, I have some strange habits.

I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at [email protected].