How much power does it take to light 25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights?
Drumroll, please!
“National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” written by John Hughes, has been a classic American Christmas movie since its debut in 1989. And every holiday season, a few superfans and electrical geeks go online and ask the same questions: How much power would it really take to pull off that obnoxious, blinding light display at the Griswolds’ suburban Chicago home, and how much would it cost?
So, in the spirit of a fun old-fashioned family Christmas, we decided to try to find out. “Where’s the Tylenol!?”
At the Griswold family home, everything goes wrong before Christmas. Those tens of thousands of lights strung up by the fanatical father of the house — Clark W. Griswold, played by Chevy Chase — never seem to work. To prevent his family from giving up, Clark declares a “full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency” and, in an epic rant, calls for everyone to press on so they can have the “hap-hap-happiest Christmas” since, well, watch the clip. We’re a family newspaper.
After Clark struggles with fistfuls of wires connected to various outlets, his wife, Ellen, discovers a light switch in the garage needs to be flipped and the house is finally illuminated. The bulbs blind the neighbors, the power meter spins out of control and the utility company cranks up a nuclear power plant’s output to prevent a brownout.
The Griswold family runs out to the lawn to admire Clark’s hard work as the Hallelujah Chorus plays.
“It’s a beaut, Clark!” the elder Clark Griswold tells his redeemed son, beaming with pride.
Maybe it was a Christmas miracle. Most electricity experts and dedicated fans who have tried to calculate how much power and money all those lights would have required 35 years ago have come to a similar, sobering conclusion.
There’s no way a typical 1989 home could have powered 25,000 incandescent lightbulbs.
One Reddit user laid out a theory, solved through various equations and simulations on a spreadsheet, that determined if Clark bypassed the home’s circuit breaker, the house’s copper wires would vaporize and “every wire in the house will immediately ignite.”
“So yes, Aunt Bethany, the house is on fire,” the redditor wrote, referring to a question asked by Mae Questel’s character.
A blogger used the spinning power meter depicted in the film to estimate that the lights would have caused a 25 percent load increase on the Chicago power grid.
Gil Quiniones, president and chief executive of ComEd, a utility company that serves Northern Illinois, confirmed that the Griswold light display was all movie magic. Mr. Quiniones said that a single home could handle only 100 amps back then, which would have powered about 3,000 incandescent bulbs.
“It’s not realistic,” he said, adding that the home would have likely lost partial or complete power.
Hypothetically, Mr. Quiniones said if the lights worked and the power stayed on for at least eight hours a day, using C9 incandescent bulbs, it would have cost the family $287 a day or $8,885 per month, based on what ComEd charges customers in 2024.
If the Griswolds used modern LED lights, popularized in the past two decades and about 90 percent more energy efficient, he said it would still cost the family about $34 a day or $1,054 a month. That final bill would not include the rest of the home’s power usage.
Mr. Quiniones added that the big switch labeled “auxilliary nuclear,” manually turned on to prevent a brownout in the Chicago suburbs, is “just movie stuff.” Now, ComEd could activate switches remotely to isolate electricity issues to a home or small area during power outages or overloads.
About 360 miles east of Chicago, a family in Wadsworth, Ohio, has been lighting up their home in almost the exact Clark Griswold-fashion — without breaking the bank each year, causing brownouts or bothering their neighbors.
For over a decade, Greg and Rachel Osterland, along with their two children, have decorated their home with 25,000 lightbulbs (not one more or less, according to Mr. Osterland) to raise money for cystic fibrosis research. Hundreds of people went to watch the house’s lighting this year, complete with audience drumrolls and a rendition of “Joy to the World,” just like Clark sings in the movie.
“There have been times where it was very Griswold-esque where we do the drumroll and maybe it doesn’t light up the way we thought it was gonna,” Mr. Osterland said. “But so far, knock on wood, we’ve never had one year where they didn’t come on during our drumroll.”
As a lifelong fan of the movie, Mr. Osterland has done the math quite a few times. He determined that if the Griswolds lived in his area in 2024 and used the C9 incandescent bulbs, they would have paid about $4,656 a month for 175,000 watts of electricity. Although, like others, Mr. Osterland realized that there’s no way a regular house could have taken on that much power without some kind of a boost.
So instead of Clark’s imported Italian twinkle lights that are likely incandescent bulbs, Mr. Osterland uses LED lights that all plug into one outlet. After buying their home in 2008 the couple saved up for years to buy the lights to replicate the Griswold house, which cost them about $12,500.
“Some people save up for a car. We were saving up for Christmas lights,” he said.
Mr. Osterland said that the family has been able to use most of the same lights over the years.
Powering the light display for about six hours a day for 30 days costs the Osterlands about $25 a month. Mr. Osterland estimates that the lights use about 600 watts of electricity in a month, much less than the hundreds of thousands of watts used by the Griswolds.
The Osterland family has raised over $50,000 since 2013 for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, while stunning thousands of visitors who drive past their home every year. Mr. Osterland said their display has the approval and support of the neighborhood — unlike Clark Griswold’s.
Hallelujah!
The post ‘It’s a Beaut, Clark!’ What’s It Take to Light Up the Griswold House? appeared first on New York Times.
