Christmas Lights Advice

I just finished a quick article that covers the two most common reasons that mini lights fail.

Don’t send last season’s lights to the junk heap without trying a couple of quick tips to get them working. It’s a great way to use a resource a little longer and stretch you decorating dollars.

Here is a taste of the article:

Everyone has had problems from time to time with their mini lights – and since more folks are using them for decorating all year for parties, weddings, and Holidays – like Valentines and Halloween – it’s handy to have a few tips for getting every last hour that you can out of your light sets. (And who could stand to stretch a dollar.)

Let’s say that it hasn’t been that long since you’ve purchased your sets. You rescued them from moth-ball holiday storage. I hope you wrapped them around a wrapping paper tube or on one of the cool light storage reels that you can pick up at Target so that you don’t have a tangled knotted mess. If you did use the “chuck them” method of storage then you may have to work a bit to untangle them. As you are doing so, make sure that there are not frayed or worn wiring or insulation. If you do see any exposed wiring, discard the set and start fresh.

Here is the complete article on Mini Light Repair Tips

Shellie Gardner
Christmas Lights

Easter is just a couple of days away – I love this time of year and do the best I can not to let Spring Fever get to me.

I just realized today that I hadn’t changed out the bulbs in the 25 foot C7 light strands that we keep installed around our front flower beds. (Note, Christmas light cords are rated for 90 day outside seasonal use – so I know that they can be susceptible to UV degradation.)

So changing out the light bulbs was this evening’s project – along with a little bit of Springtime raking to unearth the light strands.

We ran 25 feet of lights on each side of the walkway that goes from the sidewalk to our concrete stairs. By doubling the 25 foot light strands it gives a more concentrated effective 6 inch light spacing which looks more impressive from the street.

I love to change out lights that we use to accent our yard all year long. (Fortunately, we live in a funky craftsman neighborhood where the folks around us look at our Christmas lights as art!)

I’ve installed opaque white, pink and purple c7 bulbs. They are sooo pretty (but apparently hard to photograph – photos coming soon!). During the day, they look like Easter Eggs – and look electric pink, purple (hotter pink) and white at night.

Christmas bulbs and cords are cheap compared to home renovation – and you can change them anytime. If you don’t have little cottage flower beds in your front yard, C7 and C9 bulbs in the colors of the season or for your party are easy to install above a deck or along a fence-line.

So go check up in your attic or out in the shed – you might not have pink or purple on hand but some clear Christmas lights are great for brightening up your Spring just as well!

Happy Easter from the Christmas light lady,

Shellie
Christmas Light Source

C7 bulbs

Is it March already?

Flowers are blooming, Spring is definitely in the air so it must be time for St Patrick’s day – and it is!!

Since I’m three quarters Irish on my Father’s side of the family I feel like I have to get into the St Paddy’s day spirit around this house. It looks like Ireland is celebrating the holiday as well.

Shorth and sweet history of St Patrick

St Patrick ministered (most think) in the middle of the 5th century. Born in Roman Britain he was captured at 16 and lived in slavery as a shepherd in Ireland until he escaped and returned home. He says that his faith grew in captivity – he prayed daily and made his escape when he was told by God that it was time to go home and his ship was waiting. It was and he did.

After he was ordained as a Bishop, he returned to the Emerald Isle to baptize thousands of Irish people. We don’t know much about the details of St Patrick’s life but he is a venerated figure in the history of Christianity and Catholicism.

St Patricks day has evolved over the years to a celebration of all things Irish and green. Where the tradition of punching a classmate if they weren’t wearing green came from… I don’t know but I wonder if kids do that any more??

Itinerary for March 17, 2010

We’ll be eating green frosted cupcakes tomorrow, wearing green and watching the Quiet Man – the perfect movie and a March tradition around this house. I wonder if you can make popcorn green?

Decorating for St Patrick’s Day with Christmas Lights

We’ll also be switching out our light bulbs around our front yard flower beds to be green (good thing we live in a tolerant neighborhood without covenants regarding having some sort of Christmas lighting out all year!!)

We’ll also be outlining a couple of doors and windows inside the house with green mini lights to make the family party more festive for just a few dollars more.

However you celebrate it, bring out your inner Irish, have some green food and light some green lights to celebrate the Holiday and Spring!!

Top O’ the Mornin’ to You,

Shellie O’Gardner
Lights for St Patrick’s Day

Just when I think that I’ve thought about Christmas lights in just about every possible way I see something new and wonder how I missed it.

It’s not earth shattering or anything but in the same way that some folks say pecan and others say pee-can, I just realized a couple of days ago that half the people in the world thing of clear Christmas lights as White. White Christmas lights – who knew?!

Well, I guess it only stands to reason – there’s red, green, blue, etc. – why not white? I guess since they look transparently clear that clear has always been my descriptive word of choice.

So… are uncolored Christmas lights clear… or white? What say you?

Along with “how can bacon burn on only one side” this question won’t mean much to anyone but a few Holiday lighting fanatics and me but I guess I’ll have to be egalitarian and start using both descriptions equally.

So whether they are clear or white…. this color of Christmas light is still the most popular and most versatile and I really must roll out some application posts this week.

Watch for some tips and tricks to be posted soon.

Best regards,

Shellie Gardner
White Christmas Lights

Mini lights have so many uses beyond the Christmas tree. Holidays are the time everyone decorates with lights, but why not break out of tradition a little and use mini lights throughout the year?

Easy Top 10 Ways to Use Mini Lights

1. Decorate Christmas Trees – yes, we know this is a favorite and there’s good reason for that. Mini lights are ideal for mixing and matching the colors on your Christmas tree. New themes to consider: purple mini lights with silver ornaments, blue mini lights with blue/white ornaments, or any other color scheme that appeals to you this year.
2. Wreaths – decorate wreaths not only for Christmas, but also for year round decorating appeal. Use red or pink mini lights for Valentine’s Day, green mini lights for St. Patrick’s Day, etc. Our clear mini lights or frost mini lights are perfect for year round decorating in the home or business.
3. Outdoors – take the mini lights outside! String lights around your patio, deck, and patio umbrella during the summer months for family get-togethers. By all means, decorate with lights during the holidays, but then leave some up following the holiday celebrations. Mini frost lights or any other color that cheers you will look great on your porch, trees, bushes, or outlining your gazebo in the back yard.
4. Birthday Celebrations – what better way to bring sparkle and fun to a birthday party? For younger children, opt for mini lights that compliment their favorite character – blue or red for super-heroes, pink for princesses, etc. Spruce up the party with pink, purple, or teal mini lights for your teenage daughter’s party.
5. Holiday Displays – light up the night in every color by decorating your holiday displays with mini lights. Reindeer come to life outlined with white mini lights. Santa will be jolly outfitted in his traditional red and white colors. The sleigh will simply sparkle with white mini lights. The Nativity crèche outlined with gold or yellow mini lights will have a “heavenly” appearance. The oversized wreath on the side of the garage will be stunning at night when outfitted with mini lights.
6. Gardens/Walkways/Water Features – gardens are a magical place in the evening hours when subtly lit with mini lights. Create the magic by adorning your trellises, arbors, and topiaries with mini lights. Outline walkways or paths through the garden. Water features are especially beautiful when the lights reflect off the water.
7. Halloween – bring together all the creepy, eerie effects of this October holiday with our green, purple, orange, and red mini lights.
8. Dances – transform the inside of your gymnasium, ballroom, or barn with strings and strings of mini lights along the ceiling, outlining doorways, and more.
9. Home – mini lights on the fireplace, in the bathroom, a bedroom, artificial trees, above kitchen cabinets, in dining room hutches, bookshelves, or as garland strung above a large window.
10. Weddings – mini lights everywhere! White mini lights along the ceiling, wrapped around tulle, and anywhere that you want sparkle.

Don’t forget – mini lights just aren’t for Christmas any more!!

Happy Holidays,

Shellie Gardner
Mini Lights

Now there is another choice in “white” when it comes to LED Christmas lights — Champagne!!

This color is a rich golden white – I love it. I think it is a great answer to a desire to have a mellower LED light on a Christmas tree. I think I’ll be using these lights with my vintage ornaments this year.

Here’s a video that I shot showing off this new color

Shellie Gardner
Champagne LED Christmas Lights

LED icicle bulbs are individual bulbs that plug into a traditional C7 light string.

Here is a video I just shot featuring these bulbs. The are a little pricey but wow! they look great.

They come in 5,7, and 9 inch lengths in either static or animated versions.

So, now you have another choice to make when it comes to planning your Christmas display!!

Shellie Gardner
LED Icicle Bulbs

It’s that time of year again! Doesn’t it feel as though you’ve blinked and it’s once again time to haul out the strings of lights, the pretty Christmas bulbs and ornaments, and the holiday displays?

Perhaps you are tired of your traditional Christmas décor or would simply like to try your hand at decorating a few more rooms of the house.

Here are 23 suggestions for sprucing up your holiday décor this year – I hope it gets your Holiday creativity going!!

1. Wreaths are a traditional decoration for Christmas, but the style of wreaths available today for the holidays are anything but traditional. Pinecones, pine boughs, and grapevines are all excellent foundations for Christmas wreaths. Decorate your wreath with birds, poinsettia blooms, berries, mini Christmas ornaments or bulbs and lights. Battery-operated Christmas lights are ideal for hanging wreaths in any area of the home and avoiding unsightly electrical cords trailing down the wall. Are you really creative? Create a Christmas wreath from past holiday-themed neckties, linen napkins, or even mismatched Christmas ornaments and ribbon for a look that is uniquely yours.

2. What is Christmas decorating without a Christmas tree? Most homes feature at the very least a large tree in a central location of the home, such as the living room, dining room, or den. In addition, consider adding smaller Christmas trees in different areas of the house to bring cheer to every room. Older children would love to have a small tree in their room to enjoy throughout the holiday months. Christmas lights come in every size, shape, and color imaginable today, so get creative and have fun when choosing the lights for your tree this year.

3. Outdoor Christmas displays are fun to create and they’re enjoyed by not only your neighbors, but by the people who purposely go searching for holiday displays on a cold winter evening. Simple displays such as a Nativity scene and a few angels are always a lovely addition to your holiday decorating plan. Want to go all out? Create a winter wonderland in your front yard complete with Santa’s sleigh, reindeer, snowmen, and snowflakes. Decorate your home, trees, and shrubs too using net lights, rope lights, icicle lights, C7 and C9 lights to add holiday cheer to the outside of your home.

Here are some other great ideas for decorating your home for Christmas.

4. Pine cones – fantastic nestled in pine boughs on windowsills, in bay windows, or lining the fireplace mantel

5. Holly berries/bittersweet – windowsills, nestled in the grapevine tree or wreath, on the mantel or around the base of a large pillar candle in the middle of the holiday table

6. Mistletoe – every doorway, of course!

7. Christmas quilts – pull out your beautiful Christmas quilts and place them in a basket beside the fireplace, over the back of your rocking chair, on table tops, and other prominent places in the house

8. Christmas table runners, tablecloths, napkins – wonderful for decorating the holiday table, small foyer tables, bedside tables, buffets, hutches, and sideboards

9. Christmas centerpieces – dining room, buffet, entertainment center, den

10. Lights of every kind, shape, size, and color – wreaths, centerpieces, doorways, holiday trees, windows, child’s bedroom, fireplace mantel, Nativity scene, and anywhere else that seems to strike your fancy (don’t forget the garage and garden shed!)

11. Garland – strung around the banister, doorways, and tops of large windows
Bows – on the Christmas tree, along the fence, on the front door, or the garage door to name a few options

12. Candles – on the fireplace mantel, the dining room sideboard, master bedroom, den, in each window, and in the foyer

13. Homemade ornaments

14. Christmas cards

15. Popcorn strings/cranberry strings

16. Ribbons with sleigh bells attached and adorning the banister

17. Christmas wrapping paper – cover your every day artwork with Christmas wrap for instant holiday cheer in any room

18. Nativity scene – support a worthy cause and consider purchasing your nativity set from Poland from the Elim Christian Center – this cottage industry is changing the lives of impoverished women – we have our own full set in our home.

19. Advent wreath and calendar

20. Grapevine trees with twinkle lights – on the porch, in a sunroom, in the 4-season porch, large bathrooms, or in a bedroom

21. Holiday villages – if you haven’t started to collect a holiday village set, consider purchasing a few pieces in a set each year and watch it grow.

22. Trains and train tracks – surround the Christmas tree or put it around the perimeter of a room for visual interest.

23. Decorate your front porch, patio, balcony or deck with lights, garland, and red bows
Lighted Christmas signs

Christmas is a wonderful time of year, filled with family, friends, and delicious goodies. Holiday decorating can be a fun activity for the entire family when you think outside the traditional ways you’ve decorated in years past.

Merry Christmas,
Shellie Gardner
Christmas Lights

So, you’ve installed all of your mini light sets – let’s say on the front of your house outlining your windows, or you’ve decorated some small trees planted closely together. Everything looks great but egad! you have lights hanging out in the middle of space, marring the perfection of your Christmas light display. Don’t despair! Here are a few tips to avoid this situation.

1. Plan your projects with a wider variety of lengths of lights. By combining short and long sets of mini lights you can more closely tailor your sets to the best length for the run. When you order your lights, make sure that you note whether the light sets have a male/female plug set or just one stackable plug. (Because naturally, if you only have on plug on a set is has to be the last set). Mini lights are commonly wired in series which means that they can’t be cut to fit. C7 and C9 stringer style light sets are wired in parallel and can be cut to fit and properly terminated so they don’t have this issue (get an electrician’s help with this – you know you have a crazy electrician brother-in-law – give him a call.)

2. For just a bulb or two jumping the gap between windows, consider wrapping those bulbs with electrical tape. The success of this plan is going to be dependent on your weather and you own propensity for perfection and tidiness in your Christmas lights display.

3. Paint the extra bulbs. For small indoor projets where you just have a couple of bulbs to hide, paint the bulbs with an acrylic black paint. Messy but effective.

4. Track down a product called Black Out Caps. These handy little plastic caps fit right over the mini lights you want to take out of your picture.

Good luck with all your Holiday and Decorating Projects!

Shellie Gardner
Black Out Caps

I’m frequently asked, “So, what’s the difference between residential and commercial led christmas lights and what should I choose?”

LED Christmas lights from HOliday Creations come in two different version. What style you choose depends on your project, installation requirements, availability and your pocketbook.

Standard LED Christmas lights come with a standard male/female plug set and can be connected up to an average of 60 sets in series. These UL rated sets are great for indoor projects, crafts and HOliday decorating. In the mini light versions of these sets – razzberry and strawberry – the LEDs are spaced 4 inches apart and come in 35 and 70 LEDs to the set. Superrazz or G12 residential sets are 6 inchesa apart and the bigger C7 and C9 Sets are spaced 8 inches apart. This 8 inch spacing is one of the biggest differences between residential and commercial C7 and C9 sets because the commercial versions are 12 inches apart.

You can use traditional splitters and extension cords to install your residential light sets.

Residential sets are frequently the best choice is you want to place lighted objects in multi places in a room and sheer number of sets is not an issue.

For external applications and those where flexibility of installation and weather resistance is a high priority, commercial LED Chrsitmas lights might be a better solution for your project. Designed with proprietary 3-wire engineering, Holiday Creation LED light sets can be run up to 125 sets is a single run. If you are looking at C7 or C9 sets which are manufactured with 12 inch spacing, that is an incredible 3125 of LEDs run off a single plug.
Commercial sets have a custome proprietary modified coax connector on each end. Spacer wires, Y’s, T’s, multiple outlet adapters, and 3 different lengths of spacer wires allow you to design a lighting plan that can light over 3000 feet of roofline, plaza, trees, etc with only one plug.

Since commercial SED light sets require a power adapter (that rectifies the incoming voltage waveform to provide reduced flicker output), they generally aren’t a good choice if you need to plug in a bunch of sets in different places since the adapters would add alot of needless expense to your materials list.

Be sure to order a couple more adapters and a few extra spacer wires when ordering your commercial lights so you don’t get caught without that one 12 foot spacer wire that you needed.

Both styles of LED Christmas lights have impact resistant injection molded LED lenses that are weather resistant – just remember you can’t remove the bulbs to customize the color and when one may eventually burn out, you’ll need to compensate for that one LED visually but doubling back during installation.

Considering the pros and cons of the two styles of LED Christmas lights only your ultimate project specifications can determine which specific style of set is right for you. So, as we get closer to the Holiday Season, grab a hot cocoa, sit down with pencil and paper and then you’ll know which choice is the right one for you.

Shellie Gardner
LED Christmas Lights