Illuminating Christmas

A family in Australia’s capital, Canberra, recently set a new Guinness Christmas lights world record after adorning their home with 502,165 light bulbs. The Richards family opened their illuminated property to visitors to raise money for charity. Now a big part of Western Christmas traditions, such elaborate displays on private homes only started to emerge in the second half of the 20th century.

The tradition of using light as a Christmas decoration originated in 18th-century Germany, before spreading to other parts of Europe and America. Families would glue candles to the branches of their Christmas trees, and light them for short periods during the dark winter months. Electric lights only arrived on the scene after Thomas Edison invented the first incandescent light bulb in 1879.

Edison also created the first string of little lights, which he hung outside his New Jersey laboratory at Christmas in 1880. It took several decades for the mini bulbs to catch on. Today, many American homes, like this one in California, are festooned with lights over the holiday season. Some installations draw thousands of visitors, and range from the creative and colorful to downright tacky.

Local councils and businesses often invest in outdoor light displays to brighten up public buildings and other spaces over Christmas. In European cities, main squares are usually decked out with a shimmering Christmas tree, festive markets and lit-up sculptures and shapes. Above is an installation in Berlin: the 220 trees lining the Unter den Linden boulevard covered in tiny twinkling lights.

Mini lights have also grown to be enormously popular in non-Western countries like China and Japan, where Christmas isn't widely celebrated as a religious holiday. Rather, commercial Christmas decorations and light displays have become a handy tool to promote business. Above, reindeer sculptures are installed in front of a busy Shanghai mall.

Christmas is an important celebration for the predominantly Catholic population in the Philippines. Traditional star-shaped lanterns called "Parol" can often be seen hanging outside Filipino homes alongside American-style Christmas lights. The stars - seen here decorating a tree during a dawn mass in Las Piñas - are made of bamboo and paper, and represent the star of Bethlehem.

Christians routinely face discrimination and marginalization in predominantly Muslim Pakistan. They make up around two percent of the population of 180 million people, and often live in fear of persecution for practicing their beliefs. Still, Christmas lights displayed here in a slum in the capital, Islamabad, attract a few curious admirers.

Most of Côte d’Ivoire's Christian population live in the South, around Abidjan, where the Perle des Lumières light festival takes place over Christmas and New Year. In 2012, many of the light designs commemorated victims of the conflict that broke out after the West African country's federal election in 2010. A bird, for example, symbolized the city rising above the bloodshed of the past.

The Lighting of Medellin, also known as El Alumbrado, is a Christmas display that began in Colombia’s second-largest city in December, 1955. Each year, the city puts on an impressive light show along the main boulevards and around the Medellin River. More than 27 million lights bulbs, costing $9 million (6.5 million euros) have been strung up in preparation for the 2013 festive season.

In recent years, energy-saving LED lights have become a regular feature of some Christmas light displays. The giant Christmas tree erected outside the Rockefeller Center in New York each year was first lit up in 1931. Since 1956, it's had electric bulbs, and in 2007 LED lights powered by solar panels were introduced. This year, a 76-foot spruce has been decorated with 45,000 colorful LED bulbs.