2025's Christmas Light Video
Added 2025-12-05 14:23:57 +0000 UTCYep. It's that time of year again. Some say it's the most wonderful!
YT Link:
https://youtu.be/oy7BrKNmZAQ
If this one seems rushed and not very well thought-out, hoo boy is that exactly what happened! I was teeter-tottering on whether I'd even do one this year, and with how busy I was in November I wasn't sure there'd be time. Well, there wasn't... but I thought I would make it anyway.
The last third of this video is an unscripted section which I'm honestly not thrilled with. It's basically a Connextras-level thing but with a delivery more in-line with what I do on the main channel. But I did want to cover some thoughts which I wouldn't have time to properly script out. So I'm curious what you think of that section - it's definitely staying in, to be clear, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.
I am literally on the road as I post this, but I hope to get captions done before the evening. And I'll be posting this tomorrow. Toodles!
Comments
A quick note about the Philips bulbs that change in temperature as they dim: you *can* filter for bulbs with this effect on their website. It's listed as "WarmGlow". In fact, Philips seems to have incorporated the tech into all of the 2700K bulbs in their "Ultra Definition" line. I know the TC video from a few years back hinted that they may have been discontinuing these bulbs, but I think the result is that they only discontinued that specific product line, and kept the tech in their "Ultra Definition" bulbs.
Josh Braun
2026-01-22 12:36:00 +0000 UTCunscripted section was wonderful!
Keith Kelly
2025-12-24 21:16:12 +0000 UTCTru-Tone just announced jewel tone mini lights today! https://tru-tone.com/pages/new-mini-lites-tru-tone™-vintage-style-led-lights?_ab=0&key=1765494474390
Ethan Hamel
2025-12-15 03:04:55 +0000 UTCMy hot take: The pure-color LED lighting that gets so much hate in these videos is actually what the original designers of colored incandescent Xmas bulbs would have made if they had the technology. They were striving for that and they just didn't have the technology at the time. I'm one of those people who likes brightly-lit rooms. I'm also on the autism spectrum and, yes, it goes against the stereotype of autistic people needing darker spaces, but in my case a dimly-lit room, or bright task lighting with a dim room all around, makes my eyes feel like they're straining too hard. I don't love overhead lights in residential settings and only have them in my entryways, though. What I do have is torchère-style floor lamps with 3 bright bulbs each. They're all smart bulbs that can be dimmed as needed, but unless I'm watching TV they stay at full brightness after dark.
Circuitmike
2025-12-15 01:14:32 +0000 UTCI see the pebble 2 duo! Would love to hear your thoughts on it. It blows my mind that e-ink displays aren't standard on smartwatches for the brightness and battery life benefits.
Jonah
2025-12-08 02:38:21 +0000 UTCFYI inclusive language note: “socket” and “plug” rather than “female” and “male”
Iris Artin
2025-12-08 02:12:27 +0000 UTCAlec, please can you make a video about household LED room lights and general illumination as suggested elsewhere in these comments - concentrating on the fact that they are stupidly expensive and barely last any time at all compared to the old incandescent light bulbs. The public are being well and truly ripped off with LED lights due to manufacturers skimping on costs, so leading to poor LEDs and bad electrical circuits in mains plugs, adapters, etc, the latter of which shortens the lives of the LEDs. Something that should be truly beneficial for us all is turning into a waste of money and future landfill.
Ginko
2025-12-07 13:21:22 +0000 UTCI fully support this suggestion - the public are being well and truly ripped off with LED lights due to manufacturers skimping on costs. Something that should be truly beneficial for us all is turning into a waste of money and future landfill.
Ginko
2025-12-07 13:19:34 +0000 UTCLast year I bought “5mm wide angle” mini lights and replaced them all this year. They are the pointiest of point lights and the concentrated brightness is uncomfortable. I switched to M5 style which are the traditional long bulb shape except with facets to diffuse the light more.
John K.
2025-12-07 02:48:41 +0000 UTCThe only christmas special I always watch! Thanks Alec, oh and no worrys, the unscripted part was great too <3
Lukas Kretschmar
2025-12-07 02:00:38 +0000 UTCFor homework I have four Floalt panels sitting atop my bookcases, and when I need Brain Be Awake Now Please lighting I turn them all on, and they uplight my ceiling and the entire room lights up as if it’s daytime (but with no visible bulbs). And then when I am done using light as a focus booster I turn them off and the room goes back to accent/task lighting mode. It ends up being about 4000 lumens of uplighting and it’s so much more usable *and* softer than the in-ceiling fixtures, that I have stopped using them at all in favor of it. I do much prefer the moody style for comfort and have about four times as many (mostly dimmer) lights dedicated to that, but it’s nice being able to con my sympathetic nervous system into daytime wakeness some nights!
Callisto
2025-12-07 01:16:15 +0000 UTCThat sounds like a lovely chance to test a pack of neutral lighting gels until you find one that provides the same lux from head to ground that a full moon does! (And then cut out a circle from it and affix it permanently over the head lamp lens. And carry supplies to fix headlamps for other hikers. And then talk about your fix and offer to fix theirs while on the trail.)
Callisto
2025-12-07 01:10:29 +0000 UTCYou might try tossing a large moisture absorber packet into the container with them when packed next month.
Callisto
2025-12-07 01:08:35 +0000 UTCThe book “Brilliant” by Jane Brox goes into more depth about humanity’s reaction to artificial light over time. There are two interesting effects I remember from it: that people tend to spend the same amount on lighting no matter how much brighter it gets, and that people soothe their fears of night (typically of creatures, of monsters, and of malice) by spending most of their artificial light budget on lumens — which makes them more afraid when they leave their light bubble. I quite enjoyed reading it a while back and it seemed relevant to your video today. (Also: I can’t use TruTone bulbs yet because they cause 120Hz stop motion shuttering for my vision, so thanks for the hope-giving flicker prediction for 2026 about these companies!)
Callisto
2025-12-07 00:59:41 +0000 UTCOk I have a different issue with led lights that I don't think you've ever talked about. Problem 1) LEDs are as close as you can get to a point light source in the real world. Problem 2) colored LEDs have a very narrow frequency output. Different frequencies have slightly different focal planes. Normally this isn't a problem because 1&2 don't apply. Since regular lights occupy some portion of our field of view size and emit a range of frequencies a bit if blurring for any portion of those frequencies is not an issue. Your eye simply focuses on the center of the distribution and it's good enough that it's not a problem. But when you have pure colors that all changes. Now a pure blue light will look noticably out of focus when your eye is focused at a pure red light and vice versa. My visual system hates this! And because Christmas lights are so close together the different colors are often right in the center of your vision. In a darkened environment like ... I don't know - looking at Christmas decorations at night ... my eyes will ping pong between one color or the other being in focus. This is not only tiring to look at but it starts to give me a headache!
Jon-Carlos Rivera
2025-12-06 19:31:30 +0000 UTCIn the nordic countries we have these kind of Christmas lights: https://www.konstsmide.se/uk/assortment/indoor-lights/candlesticks/7-bulb-welcome-light-white-2262-210ee There have been led variants available for a while now but they haven't been very good. They have been very dim or had an odd color temperature. But this year I found perfect replacement bulbs. They have the same brightness and very close the same color temperature as the incandescent bulbs. They just have a tiny piece of led filament inside a glass bulb just like the incandescent bulbs.
Juho K
2025-12-06 18:31:03 +0000 UTCunscripted section was totally fine!
eaglebeagle
2025-12-06 18:29:23 +0000 UTCGlow. Glew. Will have had glun.
Izzy the Bootblack
2025-12-06 16:45:08 +0000 UTCMy girlfriend very lovingly calls the RGB christmas decoration "falafel lights" or "kebab lights" :) Love that you are spending time on yet another video educating people that RGB christmas lights = gross
Marcus van der Merwe
2025-12-06 11:14:53 +0000 UTCYou’re my favorite Christmas light influencer.
John Lasater
2025-12-06 10:02:15 +0000 UTCSome Americans (?) in our apartment building were complaning last year that their breakers tripped when switching on the Christmas lights and later compained about their electricity bills 🤭
MrHammond
2025-12-06 08:44:53 +0000 UTCYes, the yearly rant about Christmas lights again! 🥳 Did you ever get the idea of going into Christmas lights business yourself? 😉 About the overlighting: I know what you mean... I need to wear sunglasses when I take certain trains here in Switzerland, they're so overlit with cold white LEDs... And even then, they also have reading lights installed... It seems that people get so overexposed to light that they don't know anymore that they have a night sight, walking around with blazingly bright headlight that immediately blind you... I'm more and more even wearing sunglasses at night.
MrHammond
2025-12-06 08:39:26 +0000 UTCThere is also a Jevons' Paradox kind of thing going on where people over-use lightning now that it's more energy efficient. I increasingly notice that a lot of lights are simply left on at all times. Thoroughly agree with all points made. I grew up with colorful incandescent Christmas lights, and I will have to take note of what color combination is used on the old strands that my parents have.
Eliott Wiener
2025-12-06 08:12:40 +0000 UTCGood stuff. Now I'd like a rant about the fact LED lightbulbs are made so badly they don't last any longer than incandecent onces used to! LED light can be made to last "forever" and I have a Phillips bulb from 15+ years ago that cost a lot but it still works and is just as bright as new. All newer ones last 1-2 years. That's just literal garbage.
J Ruonti
2025-12-06 06:45:32 +0000 UTCI hope there will still be a lot of cheap/bat options available to blur the marked... It's not real Christmas without a Technology Connections Christmas-Light-rant... it's a tradition :-) Looking forward to the Connextras on fixing the dead section. I was expecting the unscripted section (that was pretty good, btw) to touch upon "over-lit cars" - not the functional see and be seen lights, but all these decorative light bars, logos and other fancy lights that probably are intended to look good, but make the road ahead (and in the rear view mirror) look like a "blurry snake of light" rather than a "line of distinct cars"... . wonder if/when we start to see the problems with the cameras on "smart cars" getting confused by multiplexed LEDs on the other cars.... oops... got out on a tangent... Merry (and correctly lit) Christmas.
Thomas Gulholm
2025-12-06 06:30:01 +0000 UTCI've been wondering if we'd get a Christmas lights rant this year! As a kid I had the job of checking the lights for the tree. The bimetallic blinky bulbs always fascinated me. Cheers!
Jim Hooke
2025-12-06 05:04:35 +0000 UTCThe unscripted was fine!!
Jimmy Rogers
2025-12-06 04:08:04 +0000 UTCPeople think im crazy when I go on rants about Christmas lights and I look forward to this video every year
Steven
2025-12-06 01:38:36 +0000 UTCI agree with you on your points. And I have one extra grief. No matter how carefully I put away the lights (Yes, I've done the cardboard slab thing for a decade+), in sealed containers to protect from moisture and temp extremes.. every goddamn year I end up with half of them being dead, and taking a week to unfuckle, ultimately with me hitting a boiling point and usually throwing away at least one or two strands that just refuse to work despite working perfectly fine last year, with new bulbs, with no wire damage that can be seen or detected. WHY DO THEY JUST DIE SITTING IN A CONTROLLED, SAFE, COMFORTABLE ENVIRONMENT..?! Ironically the cheap garbage strands with the terrible lights are more reliable year over year than the expensive stuff... Which is why my lights are slowly becoming awful cheap PoS LEDs.
Honorary Octopus
2025-12-05 23:31:48 +0000 UTCUnscripted section was great! Though I do wonder if you had written it up if you'd've pondered the use of "lit" vs "lighted". I was raised by a 1960s English teacher, so a "well-lit room" will always sound too hot and smoky for me 🔥
Tryste
2025-12-05 22:58:50 +0000 UTCI just happend to realise once more, that in central Europe we scarcely use coloured Christmas lights but almost exclusively warm white (seldomly yellow) lights. Most folks either decorate (Christmas-) Trees with them or border their windows, balconys or their roof with flexible light tubes or string lights. So we actually never have (and had) problems to get "vintage" LED-Lights as long as there is a warm white version available.
Julian Kaufmann
2025-12-05 22:50:08 +0000 UTCDO NOT TELL ME YOU BOUGHT ONE OF HIS CODAS
Noah
2025-12-05 22:25:25 +0000 UTCThere is one group of people who have good reason to like those ridiculously blue 5000K lamps: people with cataracts. As the lenses in your eyes age, they yellow over time. So old people tend to see less blue light. So they tend to like light bulbs that have more blue light to compensate for their yellowed vision.
tim1724
2025-12-05 20:20:32 +0000 UTCI thought the unscripted section was perfectly cromulent -- certainly not as polished or funny as if you'd had time to compose your words in advance, and a bit more just-Alec-talking than if you'd had time to add more cutaways to images, but not bad! I wanted to mention how confused I was when you mentioned that the bad way of wrapping xmas strands involved putting them in a Jewel bag. Jewel, like Meijer, isn't something that exists in my part of the planet (Swarthmore PA), so I was trying to figure out what being lapidary had to do with it...
jimmosk
2025-12-05 20:03:20 +0000 UTCC'mon, every suburban cul-de-sac should be lit like a vegas hangover.
Nick Gully
2025-12-05 19:39:56 +0000 UTCI think I fell for this too. My childhood room was illuminated by a single 75w bulb in the corner of my room built into a table lamp about 3.5' off the ground, i needed as much help as possible to see anything...
Benjamin Kier
2025-12-05 17:25:43 +0000 UTCHe wanted to see them in person probably, and that's impossible online...
Benjamin Kier
2025-12-05 17:24:03 +0000 UTCOne of my biggest issues with modern indoor LED lighting is that the dimming range is too narrow. I got some of Philips highest end bulbs that have the color getting yellower at low dim levels, but at their lowest operating range around 1-3%, they are still brighter than incandecent bulbs at 10-25% of "equivalent wattage". I literally went out and bought new incandescent bulbs to replace my LED bulbs with because of this. I like my bulbs to be able to be just barely "on" at night, literally just enough light to see outlines of things when I'm walking to the bathroom at night.
Benjamin Kier
2025-12-05 17:23:00 +0000 UTCI can't stand the soapy yellow cast of regular lights. People say they can't see it, but I can, and so can my cameras. I want white light, please. My eyes evolved under the daylight spectrum and they prefer it. Also, I want one switch to enter/exit a room and have light. I don't want to have to run around to 3-4 fixtures to turn them on, then run around to 3-4 fixtures to turn them off. I did that enough as a kid 40 years ago.
Crash Cash
2025-12-05 16:54:31 +0000 UTC"Drive to a Target"??? What? I don't bother to even leave my front door to buy anything, because I already know it's not in stock anywhere in a 220 mile radius. I get fasteners at Ace Hardware and that's it. Edit: I even bought my Christmas tree online.
Crash Cash
2025-12-05 16:36:37 +0000 UTCI think you're on to something about people preferring daylight and calling it "brighter" and our lack of word choice. I grew up in a drafty farmhouse with no overhead light, 7.5 foot ceilings, 2 outlets. So just 2 lamps that you had to go reach behind the end table to swap what was plugged in to turn on. Each barely contained a 60 watt bulb supplied by the electric coop. Big curtains covering all daylight and drafts for months and quilts nailed through on the door to the kitchen. So yah, as an adult with my own money to spend I couldn't stand the yellow glow of a cheap 2700. They make me feel cold and seasonally depressed.
Laurel Carty
2025-12-05 16:33:57 +0000 UTCI work with a bunch of people that all brought in their own desk lamps so they could turn off the overhead fluorescent lighting in the office...
Retro Sean
2025-12-05 16:14:16 +0000 UTCPebble Watch looking good
Michael Cotton
2025-12-05 16:10:15 +0000 UTCLet me get my bingo card and let's go: Spectrum Gaming PC White LED Incandescent
Pascal Cuoq
2025-12-05 16:10:14 +0000 UTCAlways here for the annual Xmas light rant, even though I'm one of those weirdos that prefers certain single vivid color strands rather than the more traditional four or five color combo strands.
Alice Wonderchek
2025-12-05 15:50:54 +0000 UTCI would like to point out one more reason to like daylight-range LED lighting: my home has many windows and skylights. When I use daylight balanced LED lighting for tasks/directed lighting, it blends seamlessly with the rest of the natural light and feels much more harmonious to me. I don't use daylight lights after dark, that'd be silly.
Will Josephson
2025-12-05 15:29:39 +0000 UTCJust rewatched the 2024 yesterday, so this release was fun timing. These videos are a gem.
Nate M
2025-12-05 15:28:29 +0000 UTCVery thorough, and THANK YOU for calling out excessively bright Xmas decorations and products. My bugaboo is hikers' headlamps, which only need to be bright enough that you don't trip on stuff. Personally, I'm good with moonlight, but haven't figured out how to get it reliably every night.
Robert Weiss
2025-12-05 15:21:10 +0000 UTCCopyright free chicken yodeling?
William Wallace
2025-12-05 15:13:29 +0000 UTCIn my office I never use the overhead light - I use a table top lamp instead. The overhead is way too bright!
Francis
2025-12-05 14:42:14 +0000 UTCThis is my favorite video out of every year
Jesus_Piece17
2025-12-05 14:27:19 +0000 UTCI stopped watching the Betacam video for this
The Alternative Channel
2025-12-05 14:25:21 +0000 UTC
