I’ve upgraded my house’s holiday lights for the last time
Living in a suburban neighborhood brings certain unspoken expectations. Walk down these streets during the last few months of the year and you’ll see inflatable monsters and turkeys and snowmen, giant skeletons, and more. There’s a house down the block that’s had an inflatable monster of some sort for weeks. Another house around the corner has a half-dozen of them. And, of course, the lights. Spooky orange vines dangling from my neighbor’s trees in October lead to sparkling Christmas lights everywhere in November and December.
While there’s no law to force participation, if your house is not decorated during this time of year, it really stands out. I resent the requirement to participate, but not as much as I hate being known as the guy who doesn’t participate.
For years, I hung string lights around the roof line of our house and screwed a color-changing bulb in our front door lamp. But after about a decade, I just got tired of it. I told my wife that if she really cared about this, she’d need to take over for me. Which she did, for a few years. But the cheap LEDs were constantly failing, the little plastic hangars to string them up with got brittle and shattered, and it ground her down, too.
This is when I decided that if we’re in for a penny, we’re in for a pound. Permanent holiday lights. Could it be done?
My goals were the ability for me to install them myself, for them not to be too expensive, and for them to last. Not the cheap stuff from Amazon, but professional-grade systems designed to last. Ideally, the lights would also be programmable so that they could serve us throughout the year, not just during the holidays.
Fortunately, some dude on Reddit made a Google spreadsheet of the pros and cons of all the major permanent Christmas lights that are available. There were nearly a dozen options.
This led, of course, to the detail questions: What’s the style? Do they point down or outward? Are they pucks or strips, or pixel lights? What voltage is required? What software controls them?
Our house, built on the cheap in a suburban post-war tract in California, is weird. It’s a single story, which simplifies things, but the fascia at the roofline is a flat board. There’s no gutter, and many lights assume you live in a house with gutters at the roofline.
This limited my options. I decided to go with Everlights, which were in the middle of the price range for these things, and offered a DIY option that appeared manageable for someone like me.
The Everlights starter pack came with a bunch of thin, six-foot-long aluminum pieces, color-matched to my off-white fascia. Each piece featured a channel for the lights themselves, strips of four well-insulated wires connecting substantial plastic LED rectangles. These were solid, almost rugged—and the wire set even includes one wire that is simply a backup in case the primary data channel fails.
The LEDs themselves have threaded protrusions that are meant to be pushed through holes drilled in a gutter, then held in place by clear plastic nuts that you screw in. It’s clever, but I don’t have gutters. The aluminum pieces Everlights provided did fit when mounted just behind the wood fascia, except for the fact that every few feet, the fascia is connected to support beams.
The solution involved cutting the flat mounting portion where beams crossed, folding it back, and sliding the aluminum behind the roof line. Where beams interfered, I notched out the aluminum (so thin I could use a pair of scissors), leaving only the light channel visible from the street. I spent a few hours on a ladder, marking the aluminum pieces with a pencil, cutting them with my scissors, fitting them behind the fascia and around the beams, and screwing them into place.
When I was finished, the whole roofline of my house, when seen from the street, had the aluminum channel with Everlights LEDs facing out. The Everlights system features a wireless transmitter that connects to Ethernet inside my house, and plugs into an exterior outlet that I had my electrician install. I had to do some wire stripping and crimping, and used a butane torch for some heat sealing of waterproof connections, but as someone with a strict “no soldering” policy, it was entirely within my capacity as a vaguely unqualified suburban homeowner.
To control the Everlights, I use their iOS app, which is what I would call functional, if not good. It doesn’t behave like a proper iOS app, but once you get the hang of it, it’s relatively easy to control. I can set the lights to come on at sunset and stay on until whenever (I generally choose 11:30 p.m.), and to come on early in the morning and stay on until sunrise. The lights can be programmed to change color, appear in patterns, and animate. Everlights provides quite a few lighting patterns, and you can program your own, which I have. You can also program multiple patterns to cycle through for a few minutes on any given day. It’s a surprisingly flexible set of options.
This has led me to consult various websites like the Empire State Building lights calendar and San Francisco City Hall to see what color themes might be fun for various holidays. When it’s not a special holiday, I’ll just program a theme for several weeks at a time. I built a Hanukkah sequence that shows one more light every night. I’ve got a custom Cal sequence that I program for game days. And of course, Halloween and Christmas are now well covered.
It’s been a year since I installed the lights, and they’ve been solid the whole time. I have received my Suburban Dad Gold Medal, and our neighborhood lights FOMO is at an end. In fact, now the neighbors compliment us on our festive lights.
Am I causing them FOMO? Sorry, neighbors, I guess this is how arms races happen. I promise never, ever to put an inflatable monster or Santa or snowman in our front yard. My Tube Man—who once again stunned and enthralled trick-or-treaters this Halloween—will appear on major holidays, briefly. But that’s where I draw the line.
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