Choose Your Fighter: White Lights vs. Color Lights
Five takes on the yuletide debate.
By Sarah Archer
Like real versus faux Christmas trees, or homemade versus store bought cylindrical cranberry sauce, the preference for either all-white or color Christmas lights tends to be fixed and passionate. To proponents of each option, even entertaining the thought of adopting the method of the other side is unthinkable. White-lights people love how the monochrome glow creates a neutral base layer for colorful ornaments, while color-lights people crave the brilliant shimmer of different hues bouncing off glass doo-dads like a jolly kaleidoscope.
I grew up with a real tree decorated with color lights and lots of colorful and varied ornaments from different eras. These days I have a vintage, ornaments-only wire tree from Cabin Modern in Brooklyn that (so far) appears to be cat-proof. But one winter in the 1980s, when my dad and I were visiting my grandmother in Florida, I saw a radically minimalist Christmas tableau that has haunted me—in a good way—ever since. There, on a ceramic yellow garden seat in her living room, my grandmother had placed a small, faux tree made of white feathers; it was wrapped in white lights and there was a little angel perched on top. That was the tree. No color, except for the garden seat, which was very chic; it was a blizzard of white. As a kid raised on holiday visits to Rockefeller Center—a bastion of Traditional Christmas—I found this choice, which was somehow both understated and flamboyant, puzzling. But now as an adult who has to decorate around the whims of another species, I totally get it: all holiday decoration choices are contextual. Christmas trees should make sense in their particular domestic settings, whatever that may be, and this one did.
Real versus fake trees aside, the debate between all-white versus colorful Christmas lights gets at something complex and unsettled about Christmas decor in general, which is that every version of it—including anything you might consider a tasteful version—is tacky. The tradition of decorating an evergreen tree with colorful ornaments and twinkly lights replaced the centuries-old practices of using real fruit and real candles to decorate a fir tree. An open flame near any tree, real or faux, is not safe, but it’s hard to argue against a real candle being more elegant than an electric one, just as real fruit is more demure than a shiny glass bauble. But this is the time of year when we’re supposed to flirt heavily with camp. It is not the time to hold back. Even when it’s comparatively tasteful, a Christmas tree is still a wildly impractical, glowing, colorful, tall, fragrant extravaganza in your living room—there’s no hiding it.
So what do designers, critics, and curators do in their own homes? White lights seem to have the edge, but both customs have their champions.
Kelsey Keith, Creative Director, MillerKnoll
“I prefer white lights (uniform, agnostic) mainly because they can be kept up as decoration outside of the official holiday or Christmas period. It’s nice to see lights outside when it gets dark at 4 p.m.! That said, when the whole world seems to have gone beige because it’s ‘tasteful,’ I do still love colorful lights—preferably the large ones, which a friend of mine, also a Southerner by birth, always called ‘honky tonk lights.’ I think if you’re going to go the color route, you should really commit.”
Adam Charlap Hyman, Cofounder, Charlap Hyman & Herrero
“I like all white lights when decorating in the country and colorful lights when decorating in the city. Whether the lights are all white or colorful, I love colorful ornaments, especially when they are handmade.
Growing up, we had all-white lighting, but extremely colorful tree decor, full of Victorian ornaments and things my siblings and I had made—including very tacky things. In other words, it was not a particularly tasteful tree, and I grew up liking it that way. I absolutely love tinsel—especially red and silver. I am generally less into gold. We designed [a tree in 2023] for The New York Edition in 2023. There, we watercolored ornaments that all contributed to the ‘New Yorkiana’ theme—places and people in New York that we love. And, years ago, in 2017, we designed the holiday decorations for Miami’s Design District in 2017—lots and lots of silver tinsel!”
Leah Ring, Founder, Another Human Design
“I prefer white lights, as it creates a nice soft glow and leaves a lot more room to decorate the tree with other colorful things. I think white lights can help a tree feel more elevated, and the white light will highlight the other decorations on the tree, rather than compete with them. Growing up, we always had two decorated Christmas trees in the house. The upstairs tree (which was the big, real tree) would be the ‘adult’ tree with white lights and was populated with white silk and sterling silver ornaments that my grandmother gifted our family over the years. This tree felt so fancy to me as a kid. Downstairs, we had a fake tree that was the ‘kids’ tree,’ and it had color lights and all of our children’s ornaments that various family members would give us—Christmas Barbie, various Christmas scenes with cute animals, etc. I think because my ‘kids’ tree’ had colorful lights when I was growing up, as an adult, I’m more drawn to the white lights as I associate the colorful lights with being juvenile in a way. I’m a huge fan of a very simple tree—white lights, silver tinsel, cranberries, and a star on top. I also saw a friend’s tree last season that just had beautiful blue silk bows all over it and it was one of the chicest Christmas trees I’ve ever seen.”
Alexandra Lange, Design Critic
“I just ordered white lights and a stand since my kids requested a real tree. I’ve loved my tinsel tree but they (shamed by friends) think it is too Charlie Brown. I like white lights because they are pure sparkle, moonlight on snow, and let your hopefully colorful and eclectic ornaments shine. I love a real rainbow color scheme, and our ornaments are primarily a combination of vintage glass balls in green/blue/silver/gold, new glass ornaments from the MoMA Design Store, and lots of Mexican tin animals. Also some teeny Shrinky Dink ornaments we made during a past holiday season. I’m anti-tinsel.”
Kevin Adkisson, Curator, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
“Extremely strong opinions verging on insane! [All colorful.] I just drove three hours from Cranbrook to Mount Clemens to Adrian, Michigan (across all southeast Michigan) to pick up the correct lights on Facebook Marketplace. I am deeply committed to this issue, one of the most important of our times. And I am a holy terror to fire marshals everywhere with my apartment of two outlets per room and tens of thousands of lights on individual rheostats. I also taught myself to solder this week and successfully made some vintage battery sets into plug-ins.” ⌂