Outdoor Christmas Lighting for Your Home - Sights, Sounds and Controls

Outdoor holiday lights have long been a part of the tradition of Christmas holidays.

Once the Thanksgiving holidays are over can Christmas be far behind?

Create a warm and welcoming outdoor Christmas lighting scene for your home.

Early Christians who were being persecuted would place a candle in a window as a signal that a Christian worship service was being held. The tradition of Christmas candles on indoor evergreen trees became popular in Germany in the 1800s.

After the electric lamp was invented it wasn't long before candles on Christmas trees were replaced with electric lights. Eward H Johnson, VP of Edison Electric Light Company, first displayed electric lights on a Christmas tree in his Fifth Avenue home in New York in 1882.

In the early 1900s electric lights appeared out-of-doors in several cities. The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree first used strings of electric lights in 1956 and by that time strings of lights made for the outside were being used all across America to decorate outside Christmas trees.

Drive around in your community just before Christmas and enjoy the great variety of different approaches to outdoor Christmas lighting.

Today outdoor holiday lights are used in all kinds of displays -- from simple, inexpensive displays to elaborate garish presentations to lighting in public spaces and buildings.

With several strings of colored lights well placed on plants and shrubs in front of a house, the home presents a warm welcoming appearance.

Or use sparkling all-white lights. They seem to glisten as falling snowflakes giving a cool wintry holiday feeling.

Lighting your trees can be yet another opportunity for festive holiday lighting. Strings of tiny white lights wrapped around branches of deciduous trees give the feeling of glistening wet snow accentuating the tree's branch structure.

Some folks like to outline windows and doors -- or corner-lines and roof-lines. Sometimes colored lights are used -- blue lights create an almost surreal appearance. White lights create a wintry scene.

Rather that use strings of lights, other homes use spotlights to highlight home entrances decorated with Christmas wreaths and other holiday features, including The Nativity Scene.

Some homes have even created magical sound -light displays that are almost like miniature Christmas light shows.

This is made easy with the all-in-one Mr. Christmas Lights and Sounds of Christmas.

If you are a little creative you can connect it to an FM iPod transmitter so that people nearby can tune in on their car radios. That way you're not disturbing neighbors with sounds that they may not want to hear.

You no longer are limited to an extension cord to power outside holiday lights. LED lights use very little energy and strings of lights can now be powered by a small solar panel. The solar panel produces electricity during the day and stores it in a battery.

Lights come at dusk and last until the battery runs down -- usually six hours or so. Then the cycle is repeated the next day.

Batteries alone power some outside Christmas decorations -- like the wreath available from Amazon.

You can easily add ourdoor Christmas lights to your Insteon home automation network (HAN) using the Insteon Appliance Link - INSTEON Outdoor Plug-In On-Off Appliance Module.

Its made for outdoor use, so plug it into a protected outdoor wall outlet and plug a rugged outdoor extension cord to your Christmas lights display. Once you link it up to a web-enabled central controller you can switch your home lights -- including your Christmas display -- on and off from anywhere with your web-enabled smartphone .