LED Christmas Lights

If you drive by our house this holiday season, you'll see a pretty row of bluish-white icicle lights along our roofline. These are our new LED Christmas lights, which Conservative Boy so diligently hung a few weekends ago (on one of the coldest days of the month, no less).

He had grand aspirations of decorating our house a la the Griswolds, complete with lots of flashing lights and giant blow-up creatures. But, at least for this year, his attempts at going all out were thwarted after the icicle lights were hung because (a) just stringing the strands across the gutters took the better part of the day, (b) buying all those holiday decorations isn't cheap, (c) did I mention it was cold?

And so for this year at least, all you'll see are our icicle lights.

I must say, however, that I am very proud of Conservative Boy and his purchase of LED lights. I wasn't going to hound him to buy them, but I did mention that the LEDs would be worth the investment. And he heeded my subtle hint and purchased them.

They cast a bluer hue than I would've expected (so they don't quite match the yellow-white lights on our Christmas tree inside), but I can handle that because LED holiday lights consume 75 percent less energy than regular Christmas lights (at least if they're ENERGY STAR ones like ours). Plus they last up to 200,000 hours (almost 10 times as long as regular strings) without burning out or breaking because they do not have moving parts, glass, or filaments. And if one bulb burns out, you don't have to trash the entire string.

You can learn more about LED holiday lights from the U.S. Department of Energy. Oh, and you can decrease your energy usage even more by setting up a light timer like Conservative Boy did—our pretty lights turn on at about 4:45 every day and off around 10, so we don't have to worry about going outside to unplug them each night. (This is particularly nice on days like today, when the temperature outside is -18 with the windchill. Brrrr.)

P.S. Did I mention some of the icicles actually have star-shaped bulbs on the end? Very cool. (Yes, I'm easy to please.)