As someone who is obsessed with Christmas, especially nostalgic Christmases of the past, I need to talk to you about Tru-Tone Christmas lights. If your dream Christmas décor involves classic bulbs from the ’50s with that gorgeous, soft, nostalgic glow, and you’ve had it with the eyeball-melting glare of LED look-a-likes, I have great news. And it’s coming straight out of Utah.
A quick note: I fell in love with Tru-Tone Christmas lights last year. This year, Holiday Magic Hub decided to become Tru-Tone affiliates after I wouldn’t shut up about how amazing these lights are. My opinions are my own, and I paid for these lights with my hard-earned cash.
Holiday Headaches
The holidays are a stressful time of year. I’ve been dealing with one particular headache for over a decade now, and if you have a love-hate relationship with LED Christmas lights, I’ll bet you have, too.
So many of us have fond memories of the candy-colored glow of incandescent Christmas lights on the tree. (I especially loved the way they looked under a blanket of snow on the shrubs in front of our home.)
I also remember many a heated argument between my mom and stepdad about how long those lights should stay on and the electric bill come January.
As an adult, I decided that my Christmas tree lights needed to be on a lot, and I had the electric bill to prove it.
Then, along came LED Christmas lights to save us all.
Except, they were pretty dang expensive at first. And you kind of felt like you were at a Las Vegas laser light show. That ‘cool white’ was blinding, and not all that white. The blue, holy cow, you close your eyes, and you can still see it. You can probably see it from space!
Forget the soft glow of our childhoods; the Christmas of the future had arrived with LED lights, and it pulsed!
Over the years, LED Christmas lights have come down in price, making them truly affordable. We now have ‘warm white’ as a color option. (Although it’s still quite bright.) But that blue is still retina-melting, and you can still see it from space. All the LED lights meant to mimic the old C7 lights have plastic bulbs, and the colors are all wrong.
While LED Christmas lights have improved over the years, for those of us looking for that nostalgic glow, they just don’t cut it.
It seemed strange to me that in a world where I can tap my phone to a kiosk to pay for things and college students are handing in AI-generated essays for credit, someone had to have fixed these horrible LED light issues.
So, last January, while everyone else was making New Year’s resolutions they wouldn’t keep, I did what any self-respecting person who loves Christmas would do, and I started Googling.
“multicolored LED Christmas lights that don’t suck”
What? Google appreciates honesty.
And as usually happens when you tell Google that something sucks or doesn’t suck, it suggested a Reddit thread. In that Reddit thread, someone was extoling the virtues of these new Christmas lights they had found from a small outfit in Utah called Tru-Tone. The Redditor swore up and down that they were just like the old-fashioned lights their grandparents had.
So, I followed the hyperlink to the Tru-Tone website and my breath caught in my throat.
A quick aside, I am obsessed with mid-century…everything.
Whoever your marketing people are, Tru-Tone, you need to give them a raise. If the Internet had existed in the 1950s, I’m sure the Tru-Tone website would have fit right in. The entire look is straight out of an 8mm ‘Duck and Cover’ animation you would watch in school. (I’m assuming. I was born in 1979, so I missed that chicanery.)
Anyway, the entire look of the website is mid-century fun. I love it!
Tru-Tone professed to have eliminated all the headaches of modern LED lighting and to have recaptured that magical glow of yesterday.
Tru-Tone lights are a little different from most Christmas lights in that you can basically design your own string of lights. They have the traditional glass, painted C7 bulbs and even C9s and S14s if you want to go big outdoors or you’re decorating a commercial property.
You can purchase a string of 25 lights with the classic color mix of red, green, white, blue and amber. They also have the string light option in a beautiful, clear, warm white bulb, which they call Candleglow. (The LEDs inside it are even shaped like the old incandescent filaments.) And finally, they have their Jeweltone bulbs, which are closer to the pastel, candy-like colors we 80s kids grew up with. These are transparent colored bulbs in red, green, blue, amber and a soft purple.
But here’s the part that really caught my eye. You can mix and match your own lights.
You purchase the empty strings (no bulbs included) and then purchase the bulbs in your choice of colors separately. As someone who changes their mind a lot, I kind of love this. I can do everything in red and white to go with my peppermint decorations. I could do only Christmas colors: red, white and green, if I want. I could also stick with my traditional clear, warm lights.
Or I can finally have the tree of my dreams in those classic midcentury colors.
The one thing that held me back was the price. The Tru-Tone lights and strings are a bit spendy, especially when you consider how affordable the average box of LED Christmas lights is these days.
But then I reminded myself that I absolutely despise the average LED Christmas lights and that if these lights were as good as Tru-Tone insisted they were, it would be money well spent.
In the end, I decided to purchase a string of their Candleglow lights, and then a 5-pack each of the Classic Mix and Jeweltone bulbs. That way, I could see firsthand how authentic they were before committing to my entire Christmas tree.
First of all, the packaging blew me away.
I am not a packaging person. Excess packaging generally annoys me. I’m here for the product and couldn’t give two hoots about fancy packaging, especially if it includes a lot of plastic.
So, I was shocked to receive a package in a cardboard box, with paper tape. Inside, everything was packed well in brown paper. The box of string lights is all cardboard (not to mention it makes my MCM-loving heart absolutely giddy). The boxes with my colored lights, again, all cardboard.
Little to no plastic packaging.
I removed the light string from the box, and the most amazing thing happened. It was ready to put on my tree.
Every single box of Christmas lights I have ever purchased in my life has always had to relax, or I’ve had to untwist them a bit to get them to move and drape nicely, which is always fun when you’re trying to put up lights in 30-something degree weather.
The light string on these was soft, pliable and had a nice drape to them right out of the box.
And best of all – no scratched-up hands.
If you’ve ever unboxed new Christmas lights, unwound them and then put them on a Christmas tree or hung them outdoors, then you know what I mean. Most Christmas lights are covered in stabby, pokey, scratchy bits that tear up your hands unless you wear gloves.
Not the Tru-Tone lights.
There were no unfinished plastic nubs, waiting to claw at my bare hands. They also didn’t leave my hands with that gross invisible film that’s on most LED lights and makes you wonder if you’ve just upped your chances of getting skin cancer someday.
I was beginning to understand the price tag even before I plugged these lights in. Quality. That thing that seems to have disappeared from the shelves of American stores. These were quality lights. And then I plugged them in.
Folks, I got downright emotional.
They glow. They glow just like those fuzzy memories from my earliest Christmases. They properly glow.
I fully expected to be blasted by the Candleglow clear lights, but it’s that soft, hazy, warm light that you get when you use incandescent bulbs.
Here’s another shocker. When I went to swap out some of the clear bulbs for the colored ones, the bulbs were cool to the touch. I could feel a gentle warmth, but for once I didn’t risk burning my fingerprints off from the heat of an incandescent bulb.
I put the five Classic Mix bulbs on the light string, and then the five Jeweltone bulbs, and I’m not ashamed to admit, I got a little teary-eyed. The Jeweltone bulbs are the exact shade of the soft Candyland-colored lights of my childhood. Tru-tone, you guys nailed it!
And the Classix Mix? Oh, my goodness. It was just like my grandmother’s Christmas tree and every Christmas movie that has me looking for vintage Christmas lights in antique stores.
Oh, and the lights are dimmable. They are dimmable! With an inexpensive dimmer plug, you can adjust the beautiful glow they emit.
Of course, it was January, and the holidays were over, but I knew I was putting Tru-Tone lights on my tree next year. Maybe even my whole house. They were indescribably beautiful. With that decision made, the hardest decision still loomed – what color to use? Candleglow? Classic? Or Jeweltone?
Right away, I ordered Candleglow bulbs for all of my candoliers. I left those up all winter and was tempted to leave them up all year, as they make the house so cozy in the evenings, but reluctantly packed them in March.
That was last year. I packed up every single gnarly string of LED Christmas lights I owned and either gave them to my adult kids or donated them to Goodwill. I was going all in on Tru-Tone lights this year.
And that’s what I did.
Only this time, I bought the individual light strands and the bulbs separately. I chose their green light strings for the tree, but I bought the green and red light strings for outdoors as I thought that would look cute in the daytime.
Again, I was completely amazed at the plastic-free packaging and how nice these light strings were to work with right out of the box. I actually like the idea that I can put the bulbs back in their boxes at the end of the season and simply wrap up the light strings. It will save me on storage space and keep the bulbs looking nice for years to come, as the paint won’t get all scratched up.
So what color did I opt for? The Classic Christmas lights in red, green, white, blue and amber. I grin like an idiot every time I see it, and I haven’t even put ornaments on it yet.
I’ve been telling friends and family about these bulbs all year long, and now I’m telling you. If you want a big ol’ sucker punch of nostalgia this holiday season, Tru-Tone Christmas lights is happy to oblige. These lights are what LED Christmas lights should have been from the get-go! Please, don’t take my word for it. Order some, and see for yourself.
