Jake PopistChristmas is coming and with it comes the decorations! What better way to decorate your home than with stunning colourful lights? But of course, you don’t have to go as crazy as Danny Devito in Deck the Halls to get into the spirit, but this article is about how you can bring a touch of pop culture to your Christmas.
Home Alone
Where better to begin than with a Christmas classic? Home Alone features some beautiful and classy Christmas décor and lighting, especially on the McCallister home. Getting this look is as simple as purchasing a ton of LED string lights with a warm golden glow, from here simply pin the lights along the edges of your home.
It is a simple way of decorating plus LED bulbs are energy efficient and cost far less to run than a standard bulb! A set of 200 LED lights costs just 1/14th of a penny to run for 1 hour, so you won’t need to worry about running up the electricity bill.
You’ll know you’ve nailed the look when you step back and see a light up outline of your house in the dark. You can even outline each window frame with lights, and cover bushes and trees with the same kind of lights outside your home if you want to get the full McCallister effect.
Bulbs for LED lights are non-replaceable, removing the issue of finding replacement bulbs if one stops working, plus they last longer than regular lights. The life expectancy for this kind of lights is between 5-10 years, making them ideal for use at Christmas.
Frozen
Another classic winter tale, Frozen is a great source of inspiration for creating a festive snow look. With LED lights available with a blue or white glow, you can recreate your own version of Elsa’s ice palace. But the perfect LED get-up for this mission has to be icicle lights.
To light up the outside of your home, we recommend icicle lights from White Stores, who offer a unique range of icicle lights from Premier Decorations – the only icicle lights on the market to demonstrate a snowing effect as opposed to merely twinkling.
This way you can showcase an actual snow movement effect as opposed to just flashing. These lights also offer a longer drop than standard lights and have copper terminals which prevent rusting, helping them to last many Christmases.
Icicle lights can be attached to the outside of your house, on the roof or guttering but will need to be plugged into an indoor socket or covered outdoor socket. So, make sure you have sockets available before you start creating you illuminated ice castle.
Another way you can add a delicate ice queen touch is with an LED Blossom Tree. They’re simple to assemble and can be popped up outside or even used in place of a traditional Christmas tree. The beautiful LED flowers can be in any colour, but we again recommend the blue or white glow, which will give the illusion of a fabulously frozen garden, as if Elsa herself froze the tree!
Stranger Things
Not a particularly Christmassy show, Stranger Things is still a great source of inspiration to light up your home. Joyce Byers used Christmas lights in the show as a way to communicate with Will in the Upside Down, resulting in her covering the Byers’ household in a mass of rainbow lights.
Joyce created a way to communicate with Will by writing the alphabet on the wall and pinning the lights in line with the letters, an unforgettable scene in the series. But you can create your very own Joyce inspired festive twist!
Simply print off letters like those painted on the wall in Stranger Things, and you can create your own festive message! From here you can pin up the zig zag of multicoloured LEDs and peg the letters to the light wire to spell out your Christmas message. You could use them to spell out ‘Merry Christmas’ for example.
This is a great example of channelling your favourite show into your festivities and décor to create something quirky and unique. For this decoration idea, you could even use a battery powered set of lights to achieve the look, as it is more of an indoor decoration.
If you really want to follow through on the whole Stranger Things lighting look, you’re going to need a lot more lights! As Joyce also pinned the lights across her whole living room and hallway ceiling, creating a rainbow light canopy – which we have to agree looked magical.
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Our final Christmas light inspiration has to go to The Nightmare Before Christmas. If you’re a fan of Jack and Sally, you’ll love our Christmas town inspired tips. For this set of tips, you’re going to have to up your creativity.
The Nightmare Before Christmas introduces us to the twinkly candy cane wonder that is, Christmas town, and two main points of the towns décor are candy canes and strings of rainbow lights. The rainbow lights are the easy part, with many LED rainbow string lights available to drape across the exteriors of your home.
One tip we have seen across the internet is the use of ping pong balls, and attaching them to string lights to create your own uniquely decorated glow balls. To do this you need a bunch of white ping pong balls and a set of string lights – we recommend warm white or multicoloured, but you can choose whichever colour you like best.
Simply pierce the ping pong balls to create small holes to attach the ping pong balls onto the LED bulbs. Once you have attached your ping pong balls they should stay hooked on to your lights. From here the fun can begin!
Grab a permanent black marker and you can start drawing your very own Jack Skellington faces onto your ping pong balls, and you can be as creative as you like! Once you’re done step back and enjoy your new Jack Skellington lights.
If you’re not feeling up to draping lights across your home, don’t worry! There is a plan B! Why not check out a Christmas light projector? This ingenious invention allows you to cover your home’s exterior with dancing laser lights, that create a fabulously festive ambience.
We recommend White Stores Christmas projectors, as they are suitable for indoor and outdoor use, allowing you to project Christmas lights wherever you wish. You can project anything from Santa himself, to festive wording or a simple multicoloured laser light display, choose whichever suits you best.
To add to the Christmas town feel, add candy cane path lights as a final touch! They are in demand, but if you can bag yourself some candy cane path lights, we recommend lighting up a Christmas runway to your home with them, in preparation for Santa’s sleigh.
Jake Popist
