Tips for a Green Holiday Season: Lighting Your House

Living green is not just a passing choice, it is a lifestyle. This lifestyle does not change or get put on hold for the holiday seasons. Neighborhoods filled with lights, adorning homes and outdoor trees and scenes. These lights traditionally spend more electricity during the Christmas season than the same household spends the rest of the year. Green lighting choices are available and prove to be just as beautiful as the old faithful bulb lights.

LED lighting is probably the greenest choice in the Christmas lighting market. These lights can be used both indoors on Christmas trees and outdoors to adorn homes and other Christmas decor. The great thing about LED lighting is the cost effectiveness of the choice.

When a home uses traditional outdoor lights for the Christmas season, these lights burn a lot of electricity. Based upon a 6 hour light schedule, traditional mini lights will cast the consumer $5.00 per day. This cost jumps to $50.00 per day if C7 lights are used. Green friendly LED lights, on the other hand, cost a mere 50 cents per day to run the same amount of time. The cost savings is so astronomical, it has been reported that if every household in the United States changed to LED lighting for the Christmas season, more than 2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity would be saved. That is enough electricity to run 200,000 homes for a year. That is what a green Christmas is all about.

For the consumers who want something a little less traditional, green and even more cost effective, forever lights are your choice. Forever lights collect energy from the sun and light up after the sun goes down. Many homeowners may know these lights as the choice for walkways leading up to a homes entrance. The forever lights use no electricity and with a little imagination can illuminate an entire yard with elegant Christmas style.

While LED lighting and Forever lighting may be a bit costly up front, those are not your only choices. For many years, I have used the same Christmas globes on my tree. Year after year, the same globes. Last year, I decided to change up things and go all natural with dried fruits and twig wreaths. But, I was left with a plethora of Christmas globe ornaments. I decided to recycle these globes and hang them on my outdoor trees. During the day, these beauties were magnificent. At night, however, they disappeared with the sun. That is when I decided to use some left over glow in the dark paint to change that. I painted every globe with glow in the dark paint and waited. That night my yard was a Christmas wonderland of lights and I never spent one dime on electricity or special lighting.

Moving indoors, light choices can stay green as well. Fiber optic, artificial Christmas trees and decorations, offer brilliant Christmas lighting at a fraction of the electric usage.

If you just have to have that real Christmas tree to feel the spirit of the season, do not worry, green lighting choices are available from real trees too. Battery powered Christmas tree lights are a great way to use a lot less electricity this holiday season. Just remember to use rechargeable batteries and the only electricity you will be using is on the recharge.

Green Christmas choices are great for every holiday, but Christmas is especially important. With electric usage topping out during the last two months of the season, homeowners are looking for more and more ways to not only save a few dollars on the electric bill, but save the Earth and stay green as well. There are many lighting choices for consumers this holiday season. So get out there and decorate, green.