…with as few components as possible. Sorry for the blur, it was dark.
Here’s a box ioch made. It has eight quality thumb switches for their reliable “clunk!” and four backlight LEDs, mainly for the flare. To power LEDs from the mains, though, you’d need a transformer. That’s bulky, expensive and unimaginative.
So what’s the smallest schematic one could have, if 50 Hz flicker was not a problem? John remembered seeing something like this on the internet (and I zoomed out as much as I possible to make it even smaller):
The components’ values were selected using an online circuit simulator. The resistor has to be rated for high power, and the capacitor for mains voltage.