Both camps can claim the original. The first electrically lit Christmas tree, wired by Edward H. Johnson in New York in December 1882, carried 80 red, white and blue incandescent bulbs the size of walnuts, and by 1895 the White House tree had more than a hundred multicoloured lights. Colour was there from the beginning, and so was white. Electric lights stayed expensive enough that they did not generally replace candles until about 1930. What sharpened the modern argument was the switch to LEDs. Early LED Christmas lights disappointed people in both directions at once: the coloured ones, in the trade's own account, seemed very dull and uninspiring, and the white ones glowed with a faintly yellowish colour that made them look cheap and unattractive. A good deal of the complaint that Christmas lights no longer look the way they used to is really a complaint about that transition rather than about colour at all, which is why the argument has outlived the technology that caused it.