Photos: Holiday lights illuminate the world

In recent weeks, Associated Press photographers captured glistening scenes around the globe.

In New York, the famed Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center stands majestic — a Norway spruce from small-town Massachusetts, adorned with 50,000 multi-colored lights. The giant tree is also topped with a Swarovski star crown featuring 3 million crystals.

In Jemez Springs, New Mexico, traditional luminarias, also known as farolitos, flickered through the Jemez Historic Site during last week's annual Lights of Gisewa event.

On the same day across the globe in Moscow, you could peer through a window of the Hotel Baltschug Kempinski out at St. Basil's Cathedral and the GUM department store, bathed in lights for holiday festivities. At the Johannesburg, South Africa zoo, actors in glowing, winged costumes welcomed visitors for the Christmas festival of lights.

Few avenues anywhere in the world as as grand during the holidays as the Champs-Élysées in Paris, where hundreds of trees were recently lit up to resemble bubbly wine glasses — and will remain sparkling through the season.

In Germany, a 42-meter-high bright red candle — actually an illuminated medieval tower – shone in the historic city center of Schlitz in late November.

In Milan, Italy, it was a symphony in gold as people stood on a bridge and Christmas lights illuminated the Darsena dei Navigli, the neighborhood named for canals that run through the area.

Reindeer figures sparkled in Hong Kong, part of waterfront Christmas decorations. In Tokyo, people walked through a forest's worth of glistening trees in Roppongi district, decorated with hundreds of thousands of blue LED lights.

At Space Center Houston, a child hopped among colored circles, part of space-themed holiday lights, near a replica of the shuttle Independence. Illuminated angels spread their wings over Regent Street in London, thanks to hundreds of thousands of LED lights on the busy shopping street.

Sometimes, nature does the trick herself. That's what happened when a supermoon rose last month in Santiago, Chile, framed perfectly by star-shaped holiday street lights.