When the Christmas spirit is gloomy, light helps

No Christmas spirit whatsoever?

Everything is gloomy, grey, foggy, wet, joyless and above all gloomy, but certainly not Christmassy?

If you enter the word “dark” into a thesaurus, what comes out is very telling:

“evening, regrettable, pitiable, overcast, lamentable, piteable, shadowed, distressing, covered, brown, brown-haired, brunette, twilight, desolate, dark-haired, gloomy, gloomy, miserable, discouraging, wretched, pitiable, poignant, frightening, shocking, sinister, joyless, mysterious, harsh, delicate, heart-wrenching, heart-rending, hopeless, lamentable, miserable, critical, sorrowful, lightless, pitiable, agonizing, pitch-black, enigmatic, shadowy, black, black, black, black-haired, pitch-black, pitch-black, suspicious, tragic, sad, dreary, desolate, murky, indefinite, indistinct, opaque, opaque, unpleasant, unfriendly, unhappy, uncertain, unhappy, unfortunate, unclear” "Unsolvable, blurry, vague, suspicious, obscured, hazy, ambiguous" ( wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de on dark)

Evening might still be okay, and brunette might even be promising, but the rest of this sequence of synonyms frees us from having to ask our doctor why people suffer from winter depression.

The weather isn't exactly conducive to Christmas at the moment; around St. Nicholas' Day, temperatures are forecast to rise significantly above freezing, potentially even reaching double digits by mid-December. While such a forecast is more of a tendency than a certainty at the beginning of December, the fairytale of a "White Christmas," like all fairytales, is ultimately a fantasy that has become reality through long tradition.

How this wishful thinking became a tradition believed to be true is explained in detail in the article “Disenchanted – the myth of the White Christmas” . In any case, it is a fact that statistically, snow only falls in lowland areas at Christmas every 7 to 10 years (depending on the period from which the average is calculated, and this snow does not necessarily have to be freshly fallen and wonderfully white).

If there is no snow to create a more cheerful Christmas atmosphere, artificial light must (and can) take on this task:

Light creates atmosphere, especially during Advent

Whether you feel truly comfortable in your home depends significantly on pleasant lighting, and typical Christmas lighting is the quickest way to bring an Advent atmosphere into your home.

Whether you laugh or cry when you see your electricity bill also depends significantly on the lighting, and with Christmas lights you can quickly create a gloomy atmosphere in the new year.

Here are some astonishing figures:

German households consume approximately 500 million kilowatt hours of electricity for Christmas lights during the Christmas season – an amount of electricity consumption that could supply 140,000 households for a year (calculated with around 3,500 kWh per year, a realistic value for the average household, and even if the Christmas lights have probably been scaled back by now, the basic trend of the figures remains disturbing).

LEDs, not just for Christmas

For some time now, there has been a way to sustainably reduce electricity consumption for lighting, and not just for Christmas lights; here is an idea for Christmas lighting with lasting added value:

Initial scenario:

If you transform your living room into a luminous Christmas paradise with 10 strings of lights at 140 watts each, and leave these strings of lights on for 7 hours a day, you will consume around one kWh per day, at today's prices (according to Eurostat, an average of 0.2981 euros per kWh in the first half of 2014, i.e. 9.24 euros for the whole of December).

If you – like many Germans – thought it was much more: The oven consumes 3 kW per hour, so an afternoon of baking cookies quickly costs over €5 in electricity, and so does the Christmas goose…

This example calculation also helps to understand the above figures for 500 million kilowatt hours: An average of 6 light decorations are to be used per household, and if these only burn for a good 5 hours instead of 7, a German household consumes an average of 0.5 kWh per day for Christmas lights, which probably don't burn every day; let's say they burn for 25 days in December.

There are approximately 40 million households in Germany, 0.5 kWh x 25 days = 12.5 kWh x 40 million households = 500 million kilowatt hours.

LED string lights or LED light tubes instead of incandescent light strings , they only consume about one-tenth of what incandescent light strings consume, for example, 14 watts compared to 140 watts. This means you'll no longer consume one kWh per day, but rather 3 kWh for the entire month of December for the initial scenario calculated above, which costs just under one euro.

LED string lights are also available from specialist companies for a few euros, but of course it takes a few years until the entire purchase price for such new Christmas lights has been amortized through electricity savings.

Unless… you think a little further: Today you can buy LED string lights that have moved away from the usual Christmas design (green cable, yellowish candles); they have transparent or black cables and white LEDs, or they are transparent light tubes that light up at regular intervals (both available, for example, at www.leds.de, LED mini string lights, string lights with warm white LEDs, LED tube, between €5.90 and €19.90).

With LED string lights and LED light tubes, you can save electricity even after Christmas, often while also enhancing the ambiance of your home. You can hang these energy-efficient lights anywhere in your home or place them in all sorts of containers (a paper lunch bag is always handy) where focused lighting makes sense.

spotlights make sense , for example, wherever the overhead light is left on from early morning until late at night, despite the children's repeated warnings – four 30-watt energy-saving bulbs in the hallway add up to 120 watts. For five winter months, a few hours in the morning and then practically constantly from the end of the school day until late at night adds up to 8 to 9 hours and 1 kWh per day, costing almost €10 per month, or a good €110 per year. Illuminate a few such spots in your house with a tenth of the energy consumption, and you'll be on your way to wealth…

Children's Christmas? Make it colorful!

Especially if you have small children, you can also do all sorts of wonderfully crazy things with energy-saving LEDs when it comes to Christmas lights:

For example, you could create an imaginative Christmas scene on a specially set-up, multi-tiered arrangement of cardboard boxes covered with bedsheets, with an LED Christmas tree and an LED baby polar bear with a red ribbon around its neck, surrounded by 20 flickering LED tea lights in all possible colors…

A truly great cinematic experience for the very young, which can of course be decorated with various crafts; all together for around €35 ​​and no electricity costs, this decoration runs on batteries/rechargeable batteries.

But there's also plenty available with (more environmentally friendly) cables for the socket; equipped with LEDs, there are silver, gold, and colorful decorative light chains, toadstools and colorful or naturally left willow branches, snowmen and Christmas pyramids, seagulls and swans, reindeer and penguins…

Lina Sahne

Passionate author with a keen interest in art

www.kunstplaza.de