Electric lighting for Christmas trees first became widely available to the public in the early 1900s. Those early products were experiments both in electrical engineering and in marketing approaches. Today's collectors of the early lamps and of related materials are taken with both the sheer variety of products and the audacity of the manufacturers' claims.

Between 1999 and 2003, Bill Nelson recorded and illustrated the history of these lamps and the businesses behind them in the "Old Christmas Lights" web page. When Bill died, his brother George took over and reformatted much of Bill's content into his "Antique Christmas Lights Museum" web site.

What was most remarkable is how useful the sites were to collectors, considering that neither brother was a webmaster by profession, and they used web development software and photo editing tools that have long since been discontinued, as well as early digital cameras with very low resolution.

Unfortunately, when George became critically ill, there was no one left to keep the site going or even to keep reregistering the domain names. Consequently, the last iteration of the last site unexpectedly shut down in early 2010. The original URL was taken over by a "squatter" selling unrelated merchandise, and all of the brothers' work was purged from George's web server.

Recognizing the value of the Nelsons' work, the editors of Family Christmas Online™ immediately contacted the family to ask permission to restore the site for future collectors. To that end we have invested hundreds of hours rewriting code, reformatting photographs and otherwise restructuring things to make this material available to the widest possible audience.

Subsequently, readers and friends have sent us files to help us recreate the brothers' sites as they appeared at other times.

• Fred Fox, owner of NoelKat, an online vintage Christmas decoration store, supplied enough files to reconstruct the 2001 version of Bill's site.

• Tom Elmore a shortwave radio hobbyist in Alaska had attempted to reconstruct the 2003 version of Bill's site. He was glad to forward us his files for inclusion here.

• And, most recently, angel chime collector Greg Hendershot sent us enough files to begin a restoration of George's site as it existed in 2006.

It may seem redundant to restore four different versions of what was more-or-less the same web site. However, both brothers' interests changed over time, so each version has unique features. We've tried to make each version as complete as it could be, considering the resources we were able to track down. That said, if you find any broken links, etc. please contact us, and we'll try to fix the problem.

Note: The sites listed here are not archives in the sense of being direct, unedited copies of someone else's work. Each site is a restoration - the result of hundreds of hours spent tracking down missing files, as well as updating obsolete code, fixing broken links, and tweaking low-resolution photographs. For that reason, we request that you contact us before reusing large portions of this work. To reuse a few photos or lines of text, please provide the following credit:

Text and Illustrations Copyright (c) 2000-2010 by Bill and George Nelson. Used by permission of OldChristmasTreeLights.com.

As George often said, "Thanks for stopping by."

Update for December, 2013 - OldChristmasTreeLights.com Discussion Forum Rollout! - Every so often, I get contacted by a reader who has a comment about a light set, or is looking for some particular piece, or needs to repair some family heirloom. I've been doing this long enough to know that for every person who asks a question, there are a dozen with the same question who don't bother to ask. I don't have time to go back and make changes to all the affected sites each time new information comes our way, though. By setting up a discussion group, I hope to get more people involved, and allow folks who've been contributing behind the scenes to contribute more consistently.

From this point on, when we receive a question, photo, answer, tip, or other new content, we'll post it in the discussion forums first. That way other folks will be able to see the same content as soon as it becomes available, instead of waiting for me to get around to updating the various sites. You won't have to register to see the questions and answers, but you'll need to register to post directly to the forums. We are taking extraordinary measures to make certain only well-meaning "real people" sign up, so you don't have to worry about the unpleasantness you occasionally see on other forums.

If you're interested in seeing the forums, click here.

If you're interested in signing up for the forums, click here.