What happened to the tacky animated Christmas lights?

I’ve recently returned from my mainland UK residence to my small Irish town, to be ‘at home’ for Christmas.

My childhood memories of this place were a town that reused the same old, half broken Christmas lights that you were guaranteed to see year after year. There were a few particularly bad ones, I scoured the net for images of a large gold and red flashing snowflake form that if memory serves me correctly was dressed in tinsel.

I was surprised this year to see a trend hit the town that I never thought would, bland blue/white LED lights. Where has all the tat gone? The dancing reds, greens and golds modernised with static blues.

I thought this loosely relevant to what we’ve been looking at through our blog, as it signifies how people’s attitudes to colour has changed. Animated coloured lights, across the UK are becoming old-fashioned, the big cities don’t have them anymore, and now it seem small towns are beginning to follow suit. The modern light, is neat, non-obtrusive and non-offensive, to me we’ve lost a bit of magic by losing the colour from our lights.