The days of candles and simple Christmas lights to decorate your tree are long gone. Now you can find a variety of different lights with which you can let your creativity loose and make your own decorative statement. You can take it decorating from bland to fascinating. With all the novelty Christmas lights available on the market today.

These lights are simple to install and there is a wide variety available, from humorous to sleek and elegant.

Christmas lights for traditionalists

If you tend to enjoy old traditions out there rather than novel ideas, you can buy candle shaped Christmas lights to adorn your tree. The great advantage lies in safety, as the risks of a fire with electric Christmas lights is much lower than if you are using real candles. You can also opt for electric candles to decorate your table as well, and some even come with a timer in case you forget to turn them off.

Christmas lights with a little humor

Since Christmas is all about having fun, why not translate it into your decorations by using novelty Christmas lights, such as strands of beer mugs. Those will surely go over well with your guests, but caution is advised as you wouldn’t want anyone trying to drink your lights after imbibing little too much spiked eggnog. Of course, if beer isn’t your thing, and you can always go for the wine bottles and glasses.

There are scores of other humorous Christmas lights available such as M&M’s characters, Homer and Bart Simpson, and even Spiderman and Batman light sets, which are ideal for children.

Christmas lights and nature

If you love flowers and plants, and just be outdoors in general, why not use some poinsettia Christmas lights, or holy with glitter leaves, creating a beautiful contrast with the green of your tree. Butterflies would also be a lovely addition, with their multitude of colors, creating an amazing effect.

If you have more of the farmer and you then you can always put up cow Christmas lights or even tractors, in fact, you could probably re-create the entire ranch in your Christmas tree using lights. If you just want to add a little spice, then try the chili peppers on for size.

Christmas lights and sports

Why not show everyone your love for sports by using Christmas lights that emulate your favorite activity? From baseballs and gloves, to basketballs, footballs and golf bags all your bases are covered. Just plug them in and watch them twinkle.

Enjoy a Taste of Christmas Past

You can pretend to be Scrooge as you are taken on your journey to Christmas past with the Victorians shaped lamp light sets or colonial streetlamp light sets, depending on which you prefer. Just close your eyes, and imagine you are walking. The dark streets of the Victorian era, with streetlamps guiding your every step.

Of course, you can always combine different ideas by using different sets of lights in different rooms, for example poinsettias and your tree and basketballs in your son’s bedroom. With such a variety there is no limit to your creativity, let your imagination reign free and create a unique Christmas atmosphere.

Christmas is celebrated by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and has arguably become one of the most commercialized holidays with preparations beginning as early as October. The stores are full of sales and decorations, easing us into the Christmas spirit.

The multitude of colors, glitter and beauty of Christmas tree decorations sitting on the shelves is absolutely irresistible. Even though we all have boxes upon boxes full of Christmas decorations, every year we cannot resist buying a little something new.

The colorful, twinkling Christmas lights beckon us to buy at least a new set every year, especially when we are reminded of the abject terror of untangling last year’s lights. It sometimes feels as if whoever designed Christmas lights made it an exercise in torture, because as soon as you manage to untangle a few strands at one end you find that the other end has become a huge mass of knots. After you finally succeed to bring some order to the chaos, your annoyance escalates to boiling proportions when you plug them in and nothing happens. One of the bulbs has gone, and now you have hundreds of bulbs to check. Of course, this never happens when the stores are open so that you can go and buy a new set. No, you are stuck trying to locate a defective bulb, while hoping for the best, that nothing else will go wrong.

If you go through this every Christmas, then maybe it’s time you buy a set of LED Christmas lights, which use a different principle for illumination, compared to the old incandescent bulbs. LEDs use the movement of electrons within a semiconductor material to create light, and since they do not contain a delicate filament that can burn out, one defective bulb will not affect the rest of the string.

LED Christmas lights have become popular only in recent years, because they used to only be available in one color. Now, they’re available in all shapes and sizes, in a variety of colors and can even blink just like their regular counterparts. The light they emit is much brighter, and the colors more vivid, which makes them much more attractive than traditional Christmas lights.

Another benefit of LED Christmas lights is that they have a very long life, durability tests showing that they can function for over 4,000 hours without burning out. They also emit a lot less heat, significantly reducing the risk of a fire, which is not such an uncommon occurrence.

Incandescent bulbs can get very hot after a while and if you have a natural tree, as it begins to dry, you have the perfect recipe for a fire. There are Christmas lights available that only change temperature by one degree, no matter how long they have been running.

Using LED Christmas lights will also save on your electric bill, because they are much more energy efficient, using approximately 30% less electricity than regular bulbs. If you have a lot of lights for your tree and to decorate your home inside and out, changing them for LED Christmas lights will significantly reduce your bill.

LED Christmas lights will put the sparkle back into your holidays, because you no longer have to worry about broken bulbs or high electricity bills.

Like just about any tradition if you dig deep enough you can find hundreds of facts that very few people are probably aware of.  Unless you are like Cliff Claven from the popular TV series Cheers, chances are you don’t know every last little detail about Christmas trees.

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday season I’ve scoured the net to help educate both the entire Internet as well as myself about some of the interesting facts surround Christmas trees, both real and artificial.

The following fifteen facts should help you out if you ever happen to land yourself on a Christmas episode of Jeopardy.

1. Christmas Trees became a commercial business in the United States starting in 1851 by Mark Carr from New York.

2. The average Christmas tree takes roughly 7-10 years to mature and there are close to half a billion Christmas trees being grown on farmers land in the United States at any given time.

3. The first Christmas Tree to ever be decorated for the sake of Christmas was in Riga, Latvia in 1510.

4. Over 100,000 people are employed by the Christmas tree industry

5. Close to 98% of every Christmas Tree used in North America is grown in a farm and not in the wild.

6. In 2002, the world started using more artificial trees with 48% using a fake tree, 32% not even having a tree and 21% of Americans still housing a real live traditional Christmas tree.

7. Lights for Christmas trees first started being mass produced in roughly 1890.

8. Most Artificial Christmas trees are made of metals and plastics, more specifically PVC.

9. The first artificial Christmas tree was originally invented by a company that manufactured toilet bowl brushes. Addis Brush Company created the first artificial brush Christmas tree in the  1930s.

10. A real tree, once transplanted into your house, can costume up to a quart of water per day during its first week in your home.

11. 93% of people who use real Christmas Trees use their community recycling programs to reuse the left over ground up tree.

12. Roughly 175,000 real trees are sold online via e-commerce and shipped through the mail.

13. In the early 2000’s it was estimated that over 445,000 acres of land in the united states alone was used to produce Christmas trees. To make this even more interesting, it is estimated that 1 acre of land provides enough daily oxygen for 18 people which means those farms alone provide enough oxygen for over 8 million adults!

14. Roughly 35 million real Christmas trees are purchased annually in the United States.

15. The first Christmas tree to ever appear in the Presidential White house was in 1856.  The first lighting ceremony took place in  1923.

There you go, 15 interesting facts about Christmas trees you may or may not have known in the past.  If you liked these Christmas tree facts email them to your friends, I’m sure they will like them just as much as you did.

Christmas time is the one time of the year when everybody relaxes and throws their healthy diet out the window.   As a result everybody winds up getting their hands dirty in the kitchen and Christmas goodies become VERY readily available.  The one treat that I will always associate with Christmas for the rest of my life is Sugar Cookies.  I’m not sure exactly what it is about Sugar Cookies that totally reminds me of Christmas, but whatever it is, I love it.

The best part about sugar cookies, is they are extremely easy to make.  Once you’ve made the dough, you can easily cut them into any shape imaginable and they are easy enough that even the youngest in the family can help out when making them.

The following video is a step by step tutorial on how to make Sugar Cookies yourself; Enjoy!

The Christmas spirit is always alive in well amongst us humans, but have you ever taken a trip to the woods to see what the animals get up to around Christmas time?  We snuck our camera out to the woods and caught a top secret animal Christmas concert on film!  All the animals were there participating in the song.  Who knew they’d all have an English accent!

Here’s another one of those amazing Christmas light displays synced to music. More and more people are getting kits to setup these displays at their home. It is quite easy to get going if you have all the right equipment, but it can get expensive for such a frivalous holiday gimmick.

When winter rolls around, and everyone is getting into the spirit of things, there is just no substitute for the wonder of Christmas lights. Christmas lights are a traditional in homes and communities worldwide. Some places even hold Christmas light contests with money or other prizes, to encourage people to get involved in the joy of elaborate Christmas light decorating. There are only a few things you really need to know when picking out quality outdoor Christmas lights for your home.

First of all, you need to know just how many lights it will take to create your Christmas light display. Make sure you take accurate measurements of your home and all the areas that you want to cover with Christmas lights. This one simple step will save you time and gas money by preventing you from making multiple trips to the store every time you run out of Christmas lights.

And by the way, keep in mind that you should always have a few extra feet of Christmas lights just in case you run into a problem. Having a little more is always better than not having enough. There’s a wide variety of lengths available when it comes to strings of Christmas lights. And they can come with anywhere from 25-500 lights per string, depending on what type you are purchasing.

After you pick know how long you need your strings to be, you can choose which sort of bulb you want. There are several types of bulbs for you to choose from such as miniature lights, rope lights, and bigger size one (C7 and C9) bulbs. These are the most common bulbs available, but you may come across other variations in your search. There’s also a number of colors and shapes of bulb in the world of Christmas lights. The color, brightness, and spacing of these lights are going to effect the way that your house will look, so make sure that you get lights that will look good together.

And you also might want to buy some replacement bulbs in case of accidental bulb breakage or if one of your bulbs just happens to be a dud. Oftentimes, if one light on a string of Christmas lights goes out, then the entire string, or a whole section of that string, will stop working. That’s why having back up bulbs is important; you don’t

Now, let’s take a look at the cost of Christmas lights. The off season is the best time to start buying up outdoor Christmas lights, when it comes to cost. Christmas lights will only get more and more expensive the closer it gets to the big day. You can take a look online to compare prices of the Christmas lights you’re wanting to purchase. Even with shipping costs included, the Christmas lights you find online will be a better buy than the ones available to you in stores. You want to keep in mind while choosing your lights, that even though more expensive longer-lasting lights will cost you more right now, they will cost you less in the long run. One example of this is LED lights - they last longer than incandescent ones, and therefore cost a little more.

Regardless of whether or not you want to brighten up your house for the holidays, or beat out your neighbors for the grand prize in your community’s Christmas Light Contest, you’ll definitely want to contribute to the nighttime wonder that Christmas lights provide.

Pugs are so awesome and this Christmas sweater he’s rocking just makes him that much cooler.

I wonder how hard it was to get this cat into the sweater? I tried scouring Google for ugly Christmas sweaters for cats but had no luck. If anyone knows where I can get a sweater like this then hit me up via the comments. I would love to get my cat in one of these for my Christmas cards this year!

I figured kicking the blog off with an awesomely ugly Christmas sweater should be perfect. I’ve seen a lot of ugly Christmas sweaters in my day, I love them, and this Grinch sweat is absolutely one of a kind!