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Snowmen, nativity scenes, Santa and his reindeer, stockings, snowflakes, candy canes, wreaths, inflatable characters, garland, ribbons, colored Christmas lights! Christmas decorating ideas start with inspiration! Your house and yard can be a ton of fun, but without some pre-planning it can become rather cluttered looking and appear thrown together. Here's to inspiration!
Create Your Winter Wonderland With These Outdoor Christmas Decorating Ideas!
Do you want to dress up your yard, trees or bushes? Just the house maybe? One straightforward idea is to choose a theme and stick to it. If you like artificial icicles, for example, then you can use other types of lights sparingly or use a single color for other places, like around windows.
Sticking to a single theme is a decorating idea that's tried and true. It works well. This house (below) is decorated with white lights. No other colors, and it looks great! Coordinating with your interior Christmas decorating ideas can create the whole picture you really want.
Finding the balance for your house between too much and too little is key. You may consider the rooftop, lawn and porch as well as the house itself. Take a picture. Visit other houses. Explore videos online.
You can overlay a printed image of your house and yard with some tracing paper and draw out your decorating ideas until the right inspiration hits you. Don't worry if it doesn't happen right away. Keep at it and your own Christmas decorating ideas will begin to flow.
Tradition Meets Today's Christmas Lighting Standards
LED lights are dazzling and bright and don't get hot, and usually have a higher price tag than standard incandescent lights. Probably because they tend to last longer. If your initial Christmas decorating ideas begin with lots of lights and you want to make an investment for the long term, LED lights are a good choice when decorating for Christmas.
Programmable lights, lights that dance in time with music have been around for awhile now. The house in the video above was decorated in 5 years ago, apparently, and it stills rocks. I love this video because it epitomizes the latest house light decorating.
Incandescent Christmas lights are of course, traditional and seem to have a warmer, more nostalgic Christmas feel. Many years ago I invested heavily in Christmas lights - all incandescent, and now I kind of want to add to them instead of scrapping them all in favor of LED lights. That was before the LED and programmable lights craze.
Christmas Accessories - Decorating With Lighted Inflatables
If you like manufactured Christmas inflatables you can see what prices are by looking at ads. If you happen to make a purchase from something you find on this page, you'll make my Christmas a little brighter too! 😉
Lighted inflatable characters look cool at night. They are large and colorful. And, when the season is over, they can be stored in less space than what a wire framed decoration typically requires. That's a plus if storage space is a consideration.
Strings of lights can be shaped into stars or candy canes over your own wire frame too, which can be stored or discarded without too much worry over cost.
Subtle Decorations Can Help You Stand Out ..
Subtlety can change an average looking house into a clever, eye-catching house. A large wreath or red bow on the garage or front door adds a nice final touch. If you plan to combine lights with other accessories, perhaps you can keep the lighting simple, like a single color with no blinking lights. That will create a nice backdrop for your display.
When used appropriately, plywood cutouts can be subtle, and they can also be the most eye-catching. Plan your display and create simple lighting to enhance your cutouts and your outdoor Christmas decoration plans could come together quite nicely! Some woodworking plans are free, while others can cost around $5 for a single decent woodworking plan - and it goes up from there.
Develop Your Outdoor Decorating Plan..then Execute it.
Develop an overall plan ahead of time and think it through before you impulsively grab something that steals your attention. Planning will give you a clear idea of how many lights you'll need (if you're using lights), as well as which type and colors you'll want.
Look around to get the whole picture and save time and wasted effort by guessing. If you spend a little time planning, you'll have a far better picture of what's available and what you can actually do on your own. You'll get what you want without having second thoughts later on and your house visitors will get a better overall experience.
Your display should create a feeling. Address the feeling you want your visitors to have before buying a lot of different things. All too often, people buy Christmas yard decorations without planning, and then don't use everything or have too much or too little of what they really want.
Christmas decorations put people into a cheerful mood so keep the mood cheerful when planning. Pick one theme and stick with it. You can always add to it next year. Of course, if you like lots of lights, then go for it. Who doesn't love a brightly lit house!
Don't Forget The Details
Finally, don't forget the things that add final touches as well as save time and energy. A timer for your lights will keep you from having to remember when to turn everything on and off. You can have your lights go on when you want and off at 10:00 or 11:00 PM without having to do anything once it's set. It'll save energy and spare your electricity bill to boot.
Synchronized Christmas Lighting Displays
If you're looking for some great Christmas decorating ideas with synchronized lighting, there are some very cool videos you can watch online. Don't get too excited about running out and copying the big ideas though, unless you're ready for a large investment in time and money.
Spending an evening driving through a well decorated neighborhood can be very rewarding as well. Some displays can reach beyond 50,000 lights. If you choose that path you'll not only have to spend serious time setting it all up, but you'll still need to program the light "show". Forget the learning curve, it takes "pros" several hours to program a good light show.
Along with watching a cool light show, music is synchronized with it and broadcast over a low frequency radio signal. People can tune into it on their car radios. Just beware, it can take dozens and dozens of hours to develop that kind of dazzle. Watch the video below to get an inside look at one the most popular digitized homes online.
I'm not trying to steer you away from setting up your own ultimate light show. I'm just trying to keep it real. Synchronized lighting displays take serious time and effort to pull off.
In Conclusion...
Have a wonderful Christmas, I hope this year will be the best ever for you and your family. Remember too the reason we celebrate Christmas in the first place. We spend lots of time buying presents, decorating our homes and cooking great meals, so try and take a little time to thank Him for everything He's done, too.
