The Ultimate Guide to Holiday and Christmas Lighting

The holiday season is a magical but chaotic time jam-packed with school recitals, office parties, gift shopping, visiting family, trimming the tree, and many other beloved traditions. With so much going on, it’s hard to find the time or energy to think about decorating your home for the holidays. Going online to research the latest trends, styles, and safety procedures takes precious hours that could be spent with loved ones.

We’ve created this holiday lighting guide to make decorating easy. It covers everything you need to know about Christmas lights for your house, from hiring a professional and choosing a lighting style to troubleshooting light strands.

Why hire a professional to install my lights?

Great question (and great movie). There are reasons for and against, but first, let’s think about the THREE major benefits of hiring a professional to install your holiday lights and/or decorations.

Reason One: Time

The biggest reason people hire a professional in the first place is time. During one of the busiest and most stressful times of the year, the last thing people want to do is give up a precious weekend or take a day off work to pull that dusty ladder out of the garage that you’ve used twice in your life and lean it precariously against their house. Most people don’t want to test their arachnophobia by opening up that cardboard box that’s been sitting on the attic shelf since January either. We all know what Murphy’s Law dictates when you plug in those tangled old light strands you bought at Target last year – they never work.

If you’re planning to do it yourself, expect to lose a good part of a day just wrangling up the gear and working lights you need before you can even start to hang them on your house. By hiring a professional light installer, you get that Saturday back to spend with your friends and family, and you leave out all the accompanying stress and headaches. Getting this time back, for many people, is invaluable.

Reason Two: Quality

The other big reason people hire a professional holiday lights installer is the quality of the work. Have you ever driven down a street and seen two houses with Christmas lights and one just looked… off? Or maybe you’ve hung holiday lights on your own home, and even after hours of adjusting and tweaking, twisting and pulling, they just don’t quite make your home look like that winter wonderland that Pinterest promised. And no, you are not fooling anyone by stuffing the extra six feet of lights into your gutter on the corner of your house. We get it – making lights look good is hard. Good professional light installers know the tricks of the trade, and they also use commercial-grade lights that are easier to shape to the custom contours of your home. You can’t always do that with the mismatched boxes of lights you got on clearance at Walmart the day after Christmas. A quality light installation yields not only sharp, professional-looking lights on your home, but also well-performing lights. Something about a house decked out with Christmas lights just doesn’t look right when only half of the lights are working.

Reason Three: Safety

Another reason to hire a professional lighting company is SAFETY. There can’t be enough said about doing this safely. In a November 2024 release, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) estimated there are about 160 Christmas decorating-related injuries each day during the holiday season, with nearly half of them involving falls. In what CPSC calls the 2023 holiday season (November 1, 2022, through January 31, 2023), about 14,900 people were treated in emergency rooms for holiday decorating-related injuries. Hanging roofline lights means climbing ladders and walking on roofs. Throwing some lights on the bushes can be done by almost anyone, but when it comes to climbing up to the roof of a second- or third-story home, safety cannot be underestimated. The job takes the proper equipment and training. So instead of risking themselves or their spouse spending the holidays with a sprained knee, or worse, many homeowners choose to hire a professional Christmas lights installer.

If you do climb, the Electrical Safety Foundation International (ESFI) says to use wooden or fiberglass ladders when decorating outdoors, because “Metal ladders conduct electricity.” ESFI also advises using a ladder tall enough to extend at least three feet past the edge of the roof. And keep yourself and your equipment at least 10 feet from power lines.

So, taking into consideration those three reasons, why would anyone want or need to install their lights themselves instead of hiring a professional?

The primary reason people choose to do it themselves is if they’re on a tight budget. Hiring a high-quality professional Christmas light installer is not cheap, and it comes down to what good installers do. They:

• Use commercial-grade lights – no cheap-o fairy lights from the dollar store.
• Employ qualified installers who are trained specifically for this work.
• Are severely time-constrained – no one wants holiday lights installed in early September or the day after Christmas, so installers’ hours are long and days off are few and far between.
• Pay for insurance for workers on high ladders and roofs, which is very expensive.

Another reason people install their Christmas lights themselves is if they have a simple home or expect to do very minimal and accessible decorations. For example, if you have a large two-story home and you want lights all along the rooflines – good luck, but if you only want lights on a couple of bushes in your front yard, that may be a manageable enough task for you.

So at this point you know enough to decide whether you want to hang your lights yourself or hire a professional. If you’re in the former group, have fun, be safe and skip down to the bottom of this guide if you have any issues. If you’re in the latter – great! Let’s think about how to compare different holiday lights installers when you’re looking to hire a pro.

The first thing you need to understand is that not all installers are created equal. Just like in other areas of your home – window cleaning, gutter cleaning, roof cleaning, pressure washing – do you really want someone ‘experimenting’ on your most valuable asset?

How do you tell if someone has experience? Ask them how many jobs they do each year – residences and commercial properties. Ask them to name a property they’ve done before. An experienced installer who is confident in their quality will give you references that you can call. You can also ask contractors how they do the installation and what type of materials they use – the more comfortable and open they are in talking about it, the better.

The second thing you can use to compare professionals for holiday lights is the type of lights they offer. Contractors generally fall into one of three buckets here:

#1 Those that primarily hang customer-owned lights

Some homeowners may just need a helping hand with their lights and nothing else. In that case, hiring a professional that only hangs customer lights is preferred. These contractors are usually skilled in handling numerous different styles of lights and can make do with the lights you have. You’ll sometimes find newer installers in this bucket, so if you’re hoping to do more technical or complicated decorations (e.g., automated lighting displays, cafe-style lights, etc.) ask about their experience with that kind of work first.

#2 Those that hang both customer and their own lights

These pros offer the option of using your own lights or using theirs. Some will even install your lights on some parts of the property and their lights on others. They can be a great choice for homeowners looking for more flexibility on the style and design of their holiday lights.

#3 Those that hang only their own (typically custom) lights

By only offering their own lights, options and styles are sometimes limited. However, since these pros work with the same lights season after season, they know them intimately and are often able to tackle larger, more complicated jobs.

Part of choosing a pro from one of the above buckets is situational – if you have your own lights that you want to use, you can narrow your search to the first two buckets. If you don’t have lights, pros in the second and third buckets may sell you lights or lease them to you. This is often a source of confusion for homeowners, so let’s dig into it:

Purchase:

In this case, the pro provides new commercial-grade lights, installs them on your home, and once they are installed, they are your lights. Since you own them, ask the installer who handles repairs, takedown and storage, and whether your purchase covers only the lights themselves or accessories too (e.g., extension cords, timers, etc.).

Lease:

The other common option is for pros to lease the lights to the homeowner. The installation company keeps ownership of the lights, and the homeowner pays to use them for the season. That’s the model we use at Clearly Amazing – more on how it works below.

Insurance & Mid-Season Repairs

Once you’ve narrowed down the playing field to those Christmas light installers that have proper experience and offer the lighting styles and choices you want, the next big piece you’ll want to look for is insurance. This is not necessarily the most interesting or exciting thing to think about, but choosing a holiday lights installer with the wrong type of insurance, or none at all, is a big mistake you’ll want to avoid. So what type of insurance do you need from a professional installer? Two types:

General Liability:

Referred to as GL insurance, this is basic insurance that covers damage from accidents during the course of the work. Let’s say a contractor drops his ladder and smashes the roof of your brand-new Tesla – that’s the kind of damage GL insurance is designed to cover, depending on the policy.

Workers’ Compensation:

Workers’ compensation (WC) insurance protects the employees of the installing company in case they get hurt on the job – whether that means a sprained ankle, a broken bone or worse, WC is designed to cover medical bills and lost wages. It isn’t cheap, precisely because hanging lights from ladders and roofs is risky work.

Hiring an installer without both can leave you open to unnecessary risk. Our holiday lighting installation crews are covered by general liability and workers’ compensation insurance, and a certificate of insurance is available on request.

Lastly, before you settle on a Christmas lights service for your home or business, ask what happens if part of the display goes dark mid-season. Lights sit outside in winter weather for weeks, and even a well-built display can lose a strand or a section. Find out whether the installer comes back to fix it, because someone who knows their own lights can troubleshoot them far faster than someone who doesn’t. We do mid-season repairs: if a strand or section of our lights goes dark during the season, we come back out.

Choosing Decorations

Now that we’ve explored the options for choosing a professional to install your home’s Christmas decorations, let’s shift gears and look at the materials themselves. When it comes to holiday lights, Christmas wreaths, and garland, the options are seemingly endless. To help you cut through the clutter, we’ll go through the most popular styles and types of lights and other decorations to help you decide which is best for you and your home.

Mini Lights

One of the most popular styles of Christmas lights is the mini light. These come in a multitude of different sizes, shapes and lengths. Before LEDs caught on, the familiar mini was a small incandescent glass bulb on dark green wire. Now that LEDs are more commonplace, the options available have ballooned, with numerous bulb sizes, colors, and lengths readily available. Mini lights can be used in almost any setting, depending on taste, from trees and bushes to porch railings, on garland and wreaths, and even along roof and gutter lines.

C7 & C9 Lights

C7 and C9 lights are a traditional, single-bulb lighting style and a classic choice for rooflines. The bulbs are evenly spaced along the wire, and the spacing varies by manufacturer. The core difference between the two is size: the C9 is the larger, bolder bulb, while the C7 is a little smaller and subtler. This style is made in most solid colors and even RGB (red, green, blue) LEDs that can produce a wide range of colors. While these are typically installed on rooflines and gutters, they are also occasionally used on larger trees and bushes.

Icicle Lights

Icicle lights are another popular choice. Designed to look like real icicles, they combine one solid strand of mini lights with shorter strands that ‘drop’ at fixed intervals to create the illusion of real ice when installed on a gutter or roofline. The length, color, size of bulb, and distance between drops vary by manufacturer. Some models even have ‘chasing’ features, with the lights turning on and off at distinct times to give a ‘dripping’ effect off the icicles. This style tends to draw strong reactions from people – either you love them or you hate them.

Rope Lights

While not typically considered a traditional Christmas light style, rope lights still show up in plenty of holiday light displays. Rope lights feature a series of incandescent or LED bulbs inside a plastic casing and give the appearance at night of a steady beam or ‘rope’ of light. Rope lights can be installed in a number of places, including gutters and rooflines, porch railings, landscaping, and even wrapped around trees. Colors vary, but incandescent versions are typically white, while some LED rope lights offer full RGB color.

Garland & Wreaths

Traditionalists swear by the classic look of greenery in the form of tastefully applied garland outlining a porch or railing and wreaths hung at various points on the front of a home. Greenery can be either lit or unlit, and both are popular.

Greenery can also be live or artificial, and homeowners are often unsure how to choose between the two. Live garlands and wreaths are commonly made from branches of pine or fir trees, often accented with pine cones and other decorative elements. Purists argue that real greenery is the way to go, citing the aroma and the authentic look compared to some artificial garlands and wreaths. Artificial greenery, however, has real benefits. The main one is that, with proper care and storage, it is reusable year after year instead of having to buy live greenery each season. It is also much more resilient to weather than real greenery. While those in colder climates won’t have to worry about this, strong winter sunshine in warm-weather climates can cause live greenery to wilt or turn brown – a decidedly unattractive holiday decoration.

Lasers & Miscellaneous

Outside of the traditional holiday decorations, many homeowners look for ways to add unique decorative elements to their home. Plastic figurines, such as Nativity scenes, snowmen, or Santa Claus statues, still turn up on plenty of front lawns, while some homeowners are looking to newer ‘toys’, specifically lasers. Designed for holiday decorating but usable year round, a laser comes as a small black projector that looks like a landscape light. It projects small dots or holiday-themed designs onto a house or trees and shrubs, giving a very unique look. Various colors and themed designs are available, depending on the manufacturer. Lasers work best as an accent to traditional holiday lights rather than a replacement for them.

Another twist on traditional holiday decorations is automated lighting displays. These are simply systems that control any kind of lighting decoration, turning it on and off to create effects that typically coordinate with music. Automated displays range widely in complexity and cost. Basic displays can be set up by weekend warriors, but more elaborate designs are best left to lighting experts and engineers.

Choosing a Christmas Lights Style: Classic or Showpiece

Think of it as a range between two looks. Classic Christmas lights keep it simple: a single line of C9 or C7 bulbs in one color along the rooflines, maybe with a lit wreath on the front door. Fancy Christmas lights layer more in – icicles along the gutters, lit garland on the porch railing, mini lights wrapped through the trees and bushes, color-changing RGB bulbs, or even an automated display. Neither is better; it comes down to your house and your taste.

If you’re after classy Christmas lights on your house, restraint usually does more than quantity. Pick one bulb style and one color for the rooflines, keep the lines straight and the spacing even, and let a few accents – a wreath, some lit garland, a tree or two – carry the rest. A colorful, whole-house Christmas lights display can look great too; it just takes more planning to keep it from looking cluttered.

Should You Lease Christmas Lights or Buy Them?

One of the big considerations with holiday lights is whether to lease or buy. There are several factors to weigh. First, are you someone who likes the same style year after year? Or do you prefer to change up your decorations each year? If you tend to switch up designs, then buying is likely not a good solution. At the same time, if you have a “look” you expect to keep, buying your holiday lights may make sense.

If you do buy lights, buy commercial-grade LEDs. In a 2015 article, the Department of Energy says LED holiday strands are “sturdier, last longer” and are “significantly less likely to burn out or break” than incandescent strands. Look for a label from an independent testing laboratory, too: ESFI warns that decorations without one, such as a UL, CSA or ETL mark, “have not been tested for safety and could be hazardous.”

Remember that if you buy the lights, you will have to maintain them. That means storage bins, a storage area, and the ability to fix or replace whatever breaks from season to season. If you don’t want the hassle, leasing can be the low-maintenance holiday lighting option: the lights belong to the installer, and you pay for them by the season. Ask each installer what their lease covers.

Here’s how our Christmas lights service works. We lease Christmas lights: the lights stay ours, and you pay per season. We hang professional-grade LED lights in white or multicolor, cut to fit your rooflines, with clips only – nothing is nailed or screwed into your house – and use weather-rated connections. We install through December, come back out if a strand or section goes dark, and take everything down after the season. Estimates are free and done on site.

As for the cost of running your lights, LEDs make it easy. The Department of Energy says LED holiday strands “consume 70 percent less energy than conventional incandescent light strands.” Its own 2015 example is a 6-foot tree lit 12 hours a day for 40 days: $0.27 with LEDs compared to $10 with incandescent lights. That example isn’t a roofline display, and it dates from 2015, so treat it as a comparison, not a bill. We recommend setting a timer so the lights come on at dusk and go off around midnight. This gives you and your neighbors plenty of time to enjoy the lights without wasting energy running them in the middle of the night.

Troubleshooting

Inevitably, part or all of your light display will stop working at one point or another during the season. This is an expected outcome of placing small plastic electronics outdoors in the winter elements and leaving them there for the better part of two months. (If a strand or section of our leased lights goes dark, we come back out.) Now that your expectations are set, let’s dive into some common issues with holiday lights and tips for fixing them. Most issues with lights come down to a simple conclusion: they’re not coming on. So let’s take a look at what might be causing that.

Power issues

A very common problem with Christmas lights is when a homeowner’s entire display suddenly turns off or won’t turn on one day. If this happens, you can be fairly certain that you have a power issue. More often than not, the outlet the lights are plugged into is simply not providing any power. So the first step is to check whether the outlet is on – plug in a simple device such as a phone charger to see if there is power. ESFI recommends plugging outdoor lights and decorations into circuits protected by ground fault circuit interrupters (GFCIs). If the outlet is dead, a tripped GFCI is the first thing to check. A GFCI outlet shuts off the power when it senses a ground fault – current leaking where it shouldn’t, which is what can happen when water gets into a plug or socket. Hit the ‘reset’ button on the outlet and the power should be restored.

If there is still an issue, the outlet may immediately trip again. In that case, a common cause is moisture in a connection or socket somewhere in the display, or a damaged wire. The best way to find the problem is to start at the outlet and work your way out, unplugging the lights into sections. So if you have lights on your front bushes, trees, and roofline, unplug them so that you can test them individually. Start by leaving, for example, the roofline plugged in to the main extension cord and then reset the GFCI. If the lights stay on, you know that the issue is not related to the roofline. Then, with those lights still on, plug in the lights on the trees – again, if everything stays on you can rule those areas out. Repeat this method until you plug a section in and the outlet trips again. If it’s the breaker in your electrical panel that keeps tripping instead, you may simply have too much plugged into one circuit. CPSC’s advice: “Never string together more than three sets of incandescent lights and never overload electrical outlets.”

When you’ve identified the problem area, you can inspect the lights more closely for signs of water or damage. Common culprits include errant sprinkler heads spraying directly onto a connection, wires frayed or cut by rodents or landscaping equipment, or simply faulty lights or wiring. Usually, replacing the damaged section, or unplugging a section and letting the connectors dry out, will fix the problem. If you replace a cord or strand, ESFI says to make sure all extension cords and electrical decorations used outdoors are marked for outdoor use.

Breakage / Outage

Throughout the holiday season, things happen and lights do break, due to weather, animals, or your neighbor’s errant football toss. We won’t get into all the ways that lights can break, but rather go over a quick triage for what’s fixable and what’s better replaced.

First, roofline lights. Many roofline displays use C7 or C9 bulbs, which are larger individual bulbs spaced along the wire. Commercial-grade C7 and C9 bulbs are very easy to replace – just screw a replacement bulb into the socket like you would a normal light bulb in your home. ESFI says to always unplug electrical decorations before replacing bulbs or fuses. Non-commercial-grade lights vary, but they often have bulbs that are not easily replaceable. If they don’t screw in and out, you may be better served replacing the whole strand or just leaving it as is. Icicles are another common roofline light, and they are notoriously finicky because of their relatively complex wiring and the fact that they commonly bump against the fascia board of the house and break bulbs. Icicle strands are wired in sections, so one broken or burned-out bulb can take a whole section dark. The bulbs are replaced easily enough, but keep that ladder handy because you may be doing it more than once in a season.

Mini lights on trees, bushes, and other greenery can go out too. As with icicles, a broken or damaged bulb on a mini strand typically takes out a section of lights, depending on how they’re wired. Generally speaking, mini lights are inexpensive and easily replaceable, so many pros will simply replace a strand with no obvious breakage or damage rather than spend more than a few minutes trying to repair it. One exception is when a strand of mini lights is built into a display, say a wreath. Then it may take less time to diagnose and fix the issue than to replace the strand altogether.