Albania’s bright idea on festive lights has a lot to do with Goldilocks
Take a look at the main photo. It’s a government ministry in the Albanian capital Tirana as the old year gave way to new. If I remember right, it is the ministry of defense. That an austere building with a hard-edged remit is so elaborately decorated for the festive season speaks to Albania’s fascination with lights. They do them rather well — not too much, nor too little. It might be called the Goldilocks model of decorating.
Diametrically opposite the gloriously lit defense ministry twinkles the ministry of interior. The central bank is tastefully lit.
The office of Prime Minister Edi Rama (an artist, as many Albanians never fail to point out) is bright with an artistic projection.
The streets all around Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square shine delicately.
So does the central Albanian city of Belsh, an hour or so from Tirana.
Inside Nene Teresa International Airport, the trees are magical — they have lights rather than leaves.
Albania’s festive decorations were a gentle and welcome jolt because holiday lights have become so much of a cliché in the century-and-a-half since Edward Hibberd Johnson decorated a tree outside his New York City home with 80 hand-wired red, white and blue light bulbs, powered by a generator. It was the first known electrically lit Christmas tree and received public and press attention, which was exactly what Johnson intended. For, he was a loyal investor in all of Thomas Edison’s inventions, not least the light bulb patented in 1880.
It would be more than a decade before Johnson’s electrically lit tree became mainstream. In 1894, US President Grover Cleveland put electric lights on the White House tree and within a few decades, coloured electric lights were everywhere.
And so they’ve been, ever since. Everywhere and on everything.
I’ve seen so many lights, in so many capital cities, over the years, they seem always to wink at me robotically, without kindling much wonder or joy. Until I got to Tirana, I never expected Christmas lights to be so enchanting again as to my four-year-old self, back then.
But they were.
– Jack Kerouac
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
