Hello all, glad you can join me this week as we are taking a closer look at how Christmas Lights make the Trees this season on Ask the Designer.
This season I wanted to take an in-depth look at how Christmas Lights make the trees. Why? Well, several reasons which all go back to my training in decorating trees. I remember so many of the great tree designers all telling me “When you think you have enough Christmas lights, add more!” This year my Great Room tree had 3,000 lights.
This year in our Great Room, we have the Green Giant tree! Yes, it is an all-green tree, but it also has the addition of all green lights as well, which makes it glow a beautiful green glow in addition to the multicolored lights and basic white lights which came on the tree. Yes, we added three sets of additional lights to make it glow from within, which is what makes a Christmas tree really pretty.
I also added gold lights into the slim tree in the twin room, which is new this year. It came with a basic warm white light, but I really wanted to play up the gold tones, so I purchase several small counts of a golden, almost orange tone light for this particular tree. Which looks nice with the copper and burgundy decor and warms up this space. 
Now for the Woodland guest room the LED multicolored lights added a cooler tone, which always makes for a nice snowy look on the flocked tree. The color story was navy, gold and red mixed with fur accents in the Red Rider room. Retro lights played a big part of this vintage decor since that was the overall house theme this year. 
We used even more layered vintage glass bulb lights in the traditional Leg Lamp room. They are easier to see on the negative space tree which allows for the ornaments and lights to be more of the focus. This tree came with no lights at all, so we always layer a basic white mini light, so it glows from within, then lay a larger focus bulb light on top as a secondary decoration. 
In the owner’s suite it might be hard to see but we added red lights into a basic white light tree. This gives a berry effect or since it is spiraled maybe you could consider it a candy cane effect.
It is funny I always think back to when I started blogging years ago I remember some young “20 Something Instagramer” making fun of the people that decorated with colorful light; stating: “she felt like people with all white lights were classy and listen to Eartha Kitts Santa Baby while those with colorful lights were trashy listening to Chipmunks”. I still think about that very limiting statement to this very day, even though I could not even tell you who the person was it clearly made no impression. Probably just another wash in the pan on Instagram that is now a Mommy blogger that has to decorate with colorful lights, because that is how Karma works LOL.
In Years Past:
For this year we did a Rudolph Tree and added red and green orb lights. I was going for red nose lights, and these were the closest things I could find to ones that looked like glowing red noses. This was a year that we celebrated with retro television themes. 
The great room tree last year had a mixture of white lights which came on the tree, and we added in colorful candy-colored lights to give it a Barbie Day to Night color theme. Since it was all about vintage toys. I would say I used over 2,000 lights on this tree which is key, always use the right number of lights for your tree. 
I do like to work in an upward motion starting from the bottom and zig zagging up to the top. This allows the extra lights to end up at the top which makes it really glow. 
I also run the lights in and out along the branches, so they go in deep. This creates that glow from within look, instead of just laying them on top of the branches. This technique is one I picked up while decorating showhouse trees. It especially looks great on flocked trees and trees with added snow fluff, the white lights making them seem to glow all over.
I did want to share this one last photo of the Christmas lights with our sweet Dexter. We lost him on December 1 to a heart attack from a previous stroke from several months prior. We were so happy he was able to share on last Christmas with us and will forever cherish this photo taken with him sleeping under the Christmas lights only days before we lost him.
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SHOP MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY LIGHTS:
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