Legend has it that Martin Luther was the first person to place lit candles on a Christmas tree.

He was inspired, the story goes, by the image of the stars glowing brightly on the first Christmas Eve,

and he wanted to recreate that effect on the

Christmas tree, which was a decoration that originated in his native Germany.

As nice a story as it is, it's almost certainly not true. The earliest references to lights on

Christmas trees date back to about a century after Martin Luther's time. But let's pause for a moment to consider that at some point in history,

someone thought it would be a good idea to put lit candles on a tree.

Not only that, but also that the idea caught on.

I'd say the idea spread like wildfire, but that's just a little too close to the actual truth.

Having lit candles on

your Christmas tree is a problem in more ways than one. In the first place, how do you attach

them to the tree? Originally, people would melt a bit of candle wax onto a branch and then

stick the bottom of a candlestick into the wax and let it act as a kind of adhesive. But this wasn't

foolproof, of course. If you could get the candles to stay upright in the first place, the wax

wouldn't always hold, and they'd fall off. So along the way, people innovated. Some would use a pin to

pierce through the candlestick and into the branch to hold it in place.

This worked okay, but it didn't stop some enterprising folks from coming up with further innovations.

In the early 1800s, someone invented long rods that attached to the tree's trunk and extended outward.

At the end of the rod was a small clip for holding a candle steady. Later that century,

candle holders that clipped onto the branches hit the market. But there were still major problems,

like the fact that the candles dripped wax onto the tree and whatever was beneath it. And then there was the most obvious problem of all. You had lit candles on a tree that was indoors.

You couldn't keep it lit for more than a half hour at a time, and it needed constant supervision.

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