For the 55th year, GE Lighting has donated the lights and design for the National Christmas Tree and state trees lining the Pathway of Peace.
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This year’s National Christmas Tree theme celebrates holiday traditions by uniting a design focused on elegance with traditional color melodies of gold, silver and white. Twinkling icicle strings, sparkling silver mesh ribbons, and gold holographic stars are intertwined with the latest GE LED holiday lighting products.
This is the 9th consecutive year that LED lights have been used exclusively to light the National Christmas Tree. Gold LED lights provide the background for the twinkling, warm white LED icicle strings, along with gold holographic star ornaments and a shimmering platinum-silver, spiraled ribbon highlighted with cool white LEDs. These ornaments and ribbons glisten from natural daylight, providing beautiful daytime interest. To compliment the theme of tradition, an heirloom star-shaped tree topper, with commercial GE Tetra® Max LED signage product, illuminates a soft beacon of light commemorating traditions of the season.
“The National Tree is one of our country’s most time-honored holiday traditions. Through peace and war, from national celebration to national mourning, Americans have gathered together and celebrated the season through this special tree,” said Shelli Sedlak, LC, LEED AP®, Manager of the GE Lighting Institute at Nela Park, Cleveland, Ohio. “We’re pleased this year to again have designed a beautiful tree that continues a tradition of resource preservation through LED lighting and nature-friendly materials as part of this centerpiece of unification for our country.”
This year’s lighting design of over 75,000 individual LEDs includes approximately 250 gold string and net LED lights, 350 warm white LED twinkling icicle light strings, 80 gold holographic stars with cool white LED lights, and 120 cool white LED net lights for the mesh ribbon. LED light strings and nets are Energy Star® qualified.
The total cost to light this tree over the holiday season, from dusk to about 11:00 P.M. every night, is under $200. That’s about 1/5 of what a comparable design would be with incandescent lights. In terms of environmental impact, using LEDs saves 7,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, and would avoid burning about two tons of coal.