Professionally lighting your Christmas tree with novelty lights.

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Novelty lights are any string of unusual light sets. They can be lighted candles, bubble lights, and old fashioned large bulb Christmas lights. They can be icicle lights, snowflake lights, and even angel lights. Sometimes you can find flower novelty lights. They come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes you can make your own novelty lights. Typically they come 10 lights on a string. Sometimes you can find orbs, and other single items with multiple lights on them. There are even fiber optic novelty lights.

When using novelty lights on a tree, I usually cluster them. For example, let's say you have a Christmas bells novelty light string. When you place them on the tree, cluster 3 to 5 bells very close together. You can get about 3 clusters of lights from each string putting them in clusters of three. The odd light that you have when moving from one area to the next, you can pull off the light. When you get three, make a new cluster by putting them over the regular light string. You might want to wrap a colored bag tie (make it hard to see) around the bottom of the light in each of these so you can find them later. When you un-decorated your tree, make sure you locate these and put them back with the string they belong with. For a 7 1/2 full tree you would want to use about 3 to 4 sets of the bells, (or any other novelty you have). Any hanging novelty lights do well with this. If you have snowflakes, I wouldn't cluster these, I would just scatter them across your tree.

There are two types of lights that you need to try to keep standing up straight on your tree. These are: candle novelty lights and bubble novelty lights. The candles just look much better standing up straight. With the bubble lights it's important to keep them straight for the best performance. The way they work is... as the light gets hotter and hotter it makes the liquid in the bubble lights boil. As it boils the liquid goes up the stem and looks like its making bubbles inside the light. If it is not straight they don't work as well. The two trees shown on this page have bubble lights and candles. 

This tree has large plaid bows on it. The tree topper is one large bow. This ribbon was a two sided ribbon. One side had plaid, the other side was denim material (like blue jeans). When I made the bow, I made it so that I had about four loops showing the plaid and four loops showing the denim. To pull the theme of the tree together, I added about 6 more of these bows to the tree (with the topper it made 7, remember odd numbers). I wanted this tree to have a fun look to it. The store wanted to sell Polonaise ornaments. Much of Polonaise is licensed product from M&M's, Sesame Street, Betty Boop and others. This is a thick glass ornament very similar to Radko. To make it fun, we added stuffed bears, bears in stockings and lots of bubble lights. We also used regular multi-colored strings that were tied into bunches of 10 lights and placed in the center of the tree. This helped give depth and more color to the tree.

This tree was one of my favorites. This tree has a Victorian look to it. A shiny poinsettia flower with little clusters of smaller flowers and berries are used in the tree along with two different ribbons and three strings of bead garland. The ribbon and bead garland are run through the tree like a garland together. At each point where the garland is secured the flowers where placed. Along this line of garland I ran some strings of novelty candles. Notice at the base of the tree, these lights followed the garland down to the floor. Beautiful birds, Santa and Santa sleighs were used in the tree. The color combination in this tree is creamy white, mauve, pink and a touch of dark pink. This is a very elegant looking tree.

This tree had two topiary trees on either side of it. I used Red poinsettia novelty lights on this tree and the potted plants of red poinsettias were placed around the bottom. The ribbon used was a two sided ribbon. A beautiful poinsettia pattern is on one side, the other had a metallic gold ribbon. A variety of red ornaments were placed on the tree. The lights were very popular. The display was better than these pictures, I apologize for my photography. I'm not a professional although I do try very hard. The middle tree is set inside a planter and gold metallic material was used as a tree skirt around the base of the topiary trees.