I’ve been a self-declared Christmas decorations nut for three years.

What started as a string of fairy lights along the roof gutter has turned into a 20,000 LED display, growing year on year.

Am I proud of my obsession? At least it makes people smile, I’ll say that.

Whether you’re a first-time displayer, a seasoned ‘bulber’, or somewhere in-between, I hope you learn a tip or two from my first-hand experiences, failures and lessons learned.

Planning your display

The journey to a successful display for me starts in October, this is the ‘planning phase’.

Before a single bulb is hung or a new set of lights is purchased, it’s important to know what you want to achieve and therefore what you need to acquire to achieve it.

I like to draw a mud map of my front yard and sketch what lights and displays will go where. It’s also useful for figuring out power connection points (I’ll get to that later).

When choosing your lights, think about your house, garden, and front yard; work with the existing façade to accentuate your property’s features.

If you’ve got a window at the front, consider a window display; If you’ve got a long driveway, perhaps you can light down the edges; if you’ve got a spectacular tree, maybe you could liven it up with some LED animals.

For me this year, I chose three main features – an LED Christmas tree which is fixed to my 3.5m wattle, a shooting star that feeds off my entryway and the ‘North Pole’ created from a dying tree that would have otherwise been an eyesore.

Then it’s about filling in the gaps around your feature displays with colour – think net lights over hedges, fairy lights around pillars and on gutters, and perhaps a laser projector light for the garage door. I explain how I went about this further down.

Cost, design and installation

You can get a pre-made LED Christmas tree for about $40 or make one yourself using an old tree topper and a long string of fairy lights.

The aim is to have a star at the top (fixed to a tree, pole, or metal stake), and have a cascade of LED string lights falling from the star to the ground, angling out from each other to make it look like the triangle shape of a Christmas tree.

For the shooting star I used a set of multicoloured fairy lights and an LED star I bought for $30.

I fixed the star to the top of a 1.5m metal stake I bought for about $20 and ran fairy lights back and forth between the star and my roof gutter.

You can use ‘gutter hooks’ to fix any kind of lights to your roof, they are very cheap and widely available (try your local cheap shop or hardware store).

And last, but not least, the ‘North Pole’.

This was a very last-minute addition. I have a dead 2m palm tree in my front garden which is looking sad and needs to be pulled out, but before removing I decided to repurpose it for a month in the name of Father Christmas.

For this one I used red and white cloth tape, an old sheet of white corflute, tinsel, wire, and a string of crisp white fairy lights.

I taped the trunk in candy stripes, used a wire to fasten the corflute sign and covered the display in fairy lights and tinsel. The total cost was about $40.

In addition to these new displays, I enjoy creating clusters of decorations as other focus points.

This year I pulled together a little heard of deer, a festive pair of sausage dogs (inspired by my pet dachshund) and a penguin to stand guard beside the North Pole.

If possible, put your cluster displays in a garden bed, not on the lawn. They not only kill your grass, but you also have to remove and reinstall them every time you mow – which tends to be weekly in a Queensland summer.

Then comes the ‘fillers’ and ‘outliners’.

Here the aim is to colour in the blank spaces around your feature displays and highlight the shapes, lines, and edges of your home’s facade.

For this I used icicle lights to hang from the gutters, LED rope lights for the garden edges, fairy lights for the street trees and entry pillars and net lights for the hedges (net LEDs are great for covering large sections of ground or garden).

In total, over the past three years, I’ve spent a little over $1,000 on lights and displays, but only about $350 each year.

Powering up safely

I try to use solar-powered lights wherever I can.

Yes, they aren’t as bright or reliable, but they will save you on the energy bill. Most of my cluster displays are all self-powered by their mini solar panels.

For the gutter lights and displays closer to the house, I tend to use plug-in power.

This is where the mud map comes back into play.

I like to draw where my power leads and boards will run and connect to ensure I don’t overload my power points. It’s also handy to minimise leads, keeping the display as neat and seamless as possible.

To help bolster my electrical safety, I use three main pieces of equipment.

A weatherproof electrical enclosure box is key to connect multiple displays to a single power board out in the garden.

This way you only have to run one extension lead back into the house from the power board in the box, instead of individual leads from each display.

I avoid plugging my display lights directly into a power point, instead connecting through a Powerblock with an RCD (residual current device) safety switch.

You can buy them from for about $50.

A waterproof outdoor safety power box.

An RCD trips out an electricity supply in the event of a current flow to earth. In English, it protects people and your home against harmful electric shocks which typically come from faulty leads or lights.

I also use timer switches to automatically turn the display lights on and off. I usually set the lights to come on at 7pm and turn off at 11pm.

This piece of kit is essential, mainly because it’s a lot of effort remembering to turn the lights on and off every night. Timer switches range from $5–$30 depending on quality.

And that’s about all there is to it. Simple right?

If you’re starting out, this might all seem a bit much.

My advice is to not go too hard too early.

Build on your display each year, accumulating more and more lights over time.

This helps to spread the cost of decorations out over time and keeps your neighbours guessing as to what new displays they’ll see each year.

Good luck and merry Christmas!

Learn more about Christmas lights safety