AP PHOTOS: Holiday lights illuminate the world

Holiday lights are everywhere – and everywhere they look a little different. In recent weeks, Associated Press photographers have captured glistening scenes around the globe.

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. And 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.

And 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 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. And 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.

And 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.