Decorating for Christmas

We decorate a lot for xmas at our house. Last year I made some small trees from upside down tomato cages and wrapped lights around them. We do lights around each window of our house and with LED's can connect them all the way around the house together as one big strand. If you have a pole, you can also pound it into ground and make a tree off of it with green lights and stake the ends into ground with tent stakes. Then wrap lights around the green to add more color/fullness, you can even take ornaments (not glass so dont break) and hang them off the wires as if decorated. Or look on craiglist for some people getting rid of their artificial trees and put them outside and decorate them. Again you may need to pound the 'trunk' into the ground or stake it down with rope/wire. you could use PVC pipe to make a snowman outline and then wrap with lights too. We also have a display with lighted white reindeer and spiral trees in one section of our yard. We made a huge star of plywood, wrapped it with LED lights and attach it to our (no longer working/used) chimney on our roof (bolted in) and run motion lights down to a bigger nativity on the ground. The nativity was a bit pricy, but it's one of our favorite parts of our display. not sure what to say about your icicle lights as we too have those, but we don't have issues with them blowing up on our roof. You must have a lot of open space and not many trees around your house to block the wind. Hopefully some of these ideas we use spur some for you. Merry Christmas in advance :).

My husband uses special clips and it is a clip per light. These go around our porch roof. They are the big colored balls. When they are all clipped in place they can't move in the wind. Hope i helped a little...

I go for the natural look outside. I use my pumpkins & gourds from my fall decorating, lots of fresh evergreen swags, other dried naturals (from the fields around us), & big bows. Sometimes we wrap big boxes in white trash bags with big ribbons. Sometimes we use white lights on the porch supports....but usually stick with candles in mason jars or luminaries.

A magical time of the year, isn't it? !!!

I usually do some kind of wreath on the door and battery operated single candles for each window but not much more than that. I'm a real minimalist when it comes to the outdoor decor but the inside is amazing and done up like a 5th Avenue classy store front theme type thing. The kids do the decorating and the clean up after. It's great. I sip hot chocolate or cider, nibble home made chocolate chip cookies and watch them work.