Thanks to Gothamist (via Ephemeral NY) on this one. Just when you thought this local thing was gonna fizzle (wait…someone thinks “local” is gonna fizzle?), it turns out NYC has been hard for local-everything long before 2009! And, if you ignore Santa (who’s also apparently local), it sorta started with the Christmas tree:

[I]n 1882, Edward Johnson, a VP for Thomas Edison, came up with an idea: He put a string of 80 twinkling electric lights—colored red, white, and blue with crepe paper—around his own Christmas tree in his Fifth Avenue home….

Boom! And a tradition was born. However, this newfangled futuristic abomination wasn’t for the lowly poor peeps who had to keep using all those wax candles to burn down their apartments illuminate their forested wonders…

His electric lights attracted media attention and became a sensation among the wealthy [emphasis mine]. (ENY)

Ain’t that somethin’? Remember when the chair was just for those higher up on the social step stool?

“for many centuries and indeed for thousands of years it was an article of state and dignity rather than an article of ordinary use.”

That’s right. Even the chair has been handed down to us. ‘Cause any good person knows that we are basically living on the largest “chair” in the world…the Earth…and that a chair is just a way of gettin’ up high above everyone else (all the while slowly killing yourself and your psoas in the process).

And now this? Christmas lights just another hand-me-down from the rich. Humbug!