LED Holiday Lighting

Great prices on quality lights. The turn-around for delivery was very quick. I needed more lights and they also gave me the discounted 'bulk' price I had paid on my first order even though I was not purchasing as many again. Customer service has been great. A great stop for all things 'Griswold' for your xmas lights.

LED lights are cool. Literally, and very bright compared to the traditional gas-filled bulbs we were once screwing around with. Or pushing and twisting, for the English audience. And if you choose them for your Christmas or event decorations, they'll probably last you for life unless you tread on them, which as we all recognize, is not an unknown experience when erecting Christmas lights. Even then, you'd have to tread pretty hard, as LEDs are far, far more durable than the glass bulbs of old. And they come with the added bonus of not exploding and showering the carpet with invisible but lethal fragments, destined to find their way into the kitchen, bedrooms and any other especially dangerous areas.

The downside - and it may be a big one for most average consumers - is the cost. LED lighting is considerably, and I mean considerably, more expensive than the incandescent sort. Especially if you're used to buying yours at Walmart or Rite-Aid, after Christmas, when they're virtually throwing them away. Twenty times more expensive, or more, would not be unusual. But they do last, effectively, forever.

Some of these would be just perfect for the local council in the town I used to live in, where the decorations dragged out for the High Street each year came complete with the bulbs that broke last year, and the workmen who installed them didn't have the authority to change them and hadn't been given any spare bulbs even if they did, because the grant from the European Union had run out back in January. So as time passed, a greater and greater percentage of the High Street was in darkness during the holiday season, culminating in a lighting-up ceremony in which, after the Mayor had made a speech and the town Beauty Queen had thrown the switch, there was no obvious difference other than a good deal of embarrassed giggling from the twenty thousand or so townsfolk who had turned out for the occasion.

These are out of my price range (and probably that of my old home town too) but there are bonuses in durability and in the running costs, which are minimal compared to running high-wattage incandescent bulbs. And that could be the factor that swings the deal for those people who annually festoon their homes with thousands of bulbs for two weeks, and then spend the next fifty weeks paying the electricity bill.