"Close the light" — regionalism or mere oddity?

I found this from Wikipedia's entry for Canadian English in the section on Quebec's regionalisms:

It is also common for Anglophones to use translated French words instead of common English equivalents, such as "open" and "close" for "on" and "off", e.g. "Open the lights, please" for "Turn on the lights, please".

And then this from Yahoo Answers (Canada):

Q: Is the saying "close the light" proper english? Just wondering.

A: I teach English in Quebec and I hear it ALL THE TIME!!! It's a translation problem. This happens with French and Italian. -maybe other languages too.

[and further down]

A: Well Im Aussie and some of us say "close the light" as well so dont be too worried about it will you. There are those who will correct you but I think it really depends which school you went to and how your mum and dad said it.

There's also an interesting discussion on this at Ask Metafilter that seems to confirm the "Franglicism" theory.

Open the light...close the light is considered a New Jersey-ism. I grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey, a comfortable suburb of NYC, and learned from my parents to say open/close the light.

When I was 10 years old we moved to Upstate New York (only a little more than an hour north). People looked at me like I had three heads when I would say open/close the light. I noticed that people up there would say turn on/ turn off the light. As an adult I lived in NYC, and I never heard anyone say open/close the light, so as far as I know, it is a Jersey thing.

Is it perhaps a carryover from gas lights (before electricity)? Back then, to make it dark, you had to "turn off" or "close" the gas valve.

Here in California it's associated with a pidgin-Hawaiian. "Pio the light" somehow morphed into "close the light." And, weirdly enough, seems to have traveled around. My older sister, who has never been to Hawaii, uses it. No one else in the family does.

Not to inject too many family drama into the discussion, but I've always associated the phrase with the proudly under-educated sort.