No Magic in NOMA

When reading a Seattle Times story on the problem of disposable (instead of durable) Christmas lights, and recycling and so on, I found out this fact:

Edison’s General Electric pioneered the first light sets in 1903, but they were costly – renting a set of 28 was $300 in today’s dollars. In the 1920s, the National Outfit Manufacturer’s Association, NOMA, took over the business with a more affordable option, and was the largest manufacturer in the world for the next 40 years....

In the 1950s, the popularity of aluminum Christmas trees, which were not decorated with lights, hit NOMA hard. It went bankrupt in 1966.

This is a great example of how children (in this case, me as a child) have no context to understand things that already exist when they begin to make sense of the world. We had a set of NOMA lights when I was a kid, which looked just like this:


To this day, I associate those lights and the name NOMA with the magic of Christmas, despite my cynical world-weariness. So to hear that they were made by something called the National Outfit Manufacturer’s Association is just... so startling. Not another association, and especially one that sounds so generic!