Christmas lights should only be held up for so long each year. Beyond maybe a joke expression of Christmas in July, where you keep them up for like a week, you should generally keep them up for no later than a week past New Year’s Day. The question then arises of how best to put up your Christmas lights while making it a breeze to untangle the following Christmas season.
While the annual Christmas teardown of lights and decorations can be a big production, this one trick, posted to the internet by one canny woman can spare us all a huge amount of stress when it comes to those strings of Christmas lights. The secret tech that everyone ought to know about comes from one of the most unlikely of containers: a cylindrical can of “Pringles” potato chips.
Yes, you read that right. While some people might advocate for using a clothes hangar, the best way to easily dispatch your Christmas lights for storage is to use one Pringles canister per set of lights. Remember to make sure and tape the lid shut once you deposit the lights into their canister. Simply tape your lights end to end and wrap them around as you take them down. Finish by taping the other end onto the lights. You can bring this trick to another level by making a small incision into the cardboard so that the plug can be inserted into an outlet or the port of a previous string of lights and just pull the canister forward, slowly dispensing the lights in a controlled manner.
A bit more on Christmas lights
The story of Christmas lights can be traced back to Edward Hibberd Johnson. This associate of Thomas Edison was a big fan of Edison’s work and constantly strove to proliferate his ideas and profit from that proliferation in the process. While Edison had invented the electric light bulb it remained a bit of an uncertain advance of technology. The role of Christmas lights came into play as a means of replacing the traditional light sources used with Christmas trees: candles.
You read that correctly, prior to 1884, people would decorate their Christmas trees with ornaments and actual candles. Johnson managed to convince people of the idea of using Christmas lights, which are far less of a fire hazard than candles, after stringing a tree near his business with 80 red, white and blue lights, placing the tree on a rotating platform and calling a reporter to promote the novelty.
Come 1894, President Grover Cleveland was intrigued enough by electric lights to use them to accent the White House’s Christmas tree. In 1900, a set of 16 flame-shaped bulbs placed within brass sockets sold for around $12, equivalent to $350 in present-day cash. Come 1914, the cost of a 16-foot length of lights had plummeted to a mere $1.75. By the 1930s, you could easily find colored light bulbs and cones.
A bit more on Pringles
1968 was the year that these unique saddle-shaped, technically known as a “hyperbolic paraboloid,” snacks entered the market, intended to serve as “Proctor & Gamble’s” response to complaints of greasy, broken and stale potato chips. Supercomputers were used to figure out a design that would make the chips easy to ship in sizable portions while also holding up to the stress from being knocked around and stacked atop one another.
The iconic canister used to store this particular American snack food, inspired by tennis ball containers, helped ensure that the chips would be more resistant to growing stale than regular chips left to languish inside of a bag. Even though chip bags are sometimes “metalized” along their interior to preserve chip quality, some air can still seep into the bag and turn the chips stale; the plastic lid of a Pringles canister is the sole way air can permeate and render the chips stale.
