Author: xmasdirect

Do you need commercial-grade Christmas lights, or will our Home Range do everything you need?

The answer mostly comes down to where you’re decorating and the size of your display.

Our Home Range and Pro Series are both designed to create great Christmas displays, but there are some important differences between them. From the cable and LEDs to the power supply and how far you can extend them, here’s what you need to know.

The cable

Our Home Range uses a thinner cable that’s ideal for everyday Christmas decorating.

Pro Series uses a heavier-duty rubber cable designed for more demanding installations, longer term outdoor use and commercial Christmas displays.

If you’re decorating your home, the lighter Home Range cable is likely to be all you need. If you’re creating a much larger or longer lasting display, particularly outdoors or in a commercial setting, the more robust Pro Series may be worth considering.

Full and bushy or slightly more open and natural-looking?

We put two of our favourites side by side: the Koster Pine and the Colorado Pine.

Here’s how to decide which one is right for you.

Choose the Koster if you love a full, traditional Christmas tree

The Koster is all about fullness.

It has dense, bushy branches with two-tone green PVC foliage, giving it that classic Christmas tree shape that looks full from top to bottom.

It’s a lovely choice if your idea of the perfect Christmas tree is big, traditional and packed with lights and decorations.

Because the foliage is so dense, the Koster also looks great before you’ve added very much to it. Fluff out the branches properly and you’ve already got a full festive centrepiece ready to decorate.

You might prefer the Koster if you love:

• A full, bushy Christmas tree
• A traditional festive look
• Lots of foliage
• A tree that makes an impact in its own right

If you’ve been faced with tens of thousands of helpful suggestions when searching for Christmas tree lights on Google or similar (other search engines are of course available!), you’re not alone in being confused by the sheer volume of choices available.

Indoor lights, outdoor lights, warm white, ice white, multicolour, static, sparkling, flashing or multifunction, black cable, green cable, white or clear cable… it can be bewildering. But never fear – we’re here to help!

Indoor or Outdoor?

This is probably your first consideration. If your lights are going outside, you’ll need a minimum of IP44 rated light sets, in order to protect the wiring of your lights from the rain. If you are buying lights for an outdoor Christmas tree and there is no IP rating stated, just don’t buy them! Simple as that.

Outdoor Lights

Our Pro Series string lights are among the most reliable available to buy in the UK. Tried and trusted for many years, these lights are the go to solution for many professional installers and community Christmas trees. Rated IP65, with rubber cable, large LEDs and low running costs, these lights will last for years if properly assembled and stored between use. They’re not cheap – but over 5 or more years, we are confident you’ll end up spending less than if you buy cheap lights which continually need replacing.

See our full range of Pro Series outdoor Christmas lights or choose from the most popular types below

New Christmas Tree Lights for 2025

We’ve added to our range of indoor lights this year with some great value non-connectable fairy lights in three varieties. Each of these features warm white lights on a dark green cable, and come with 8 light effects and a timer function as standard.

Starting at just £18.95 for a 13.5m / 180 LED set of the Everyday fairy lights, this selection offers 3 densities of LEDs, from the Everyday through Compact versions to Clusters.

When the grandchildren drop by unexpectedly, it’s always handy to have a giant light up deer around!

In recent weeks we’ve had Evie the Collie demonstrating just how big a 10ft Christmas tree is, and last week it was the turn of the grandkids to be wowed by our huge copper foil light up reindeer.

Well, at least it meant that Pete could spend some fun time with his two granddaughters while pretending he was still actually working…

This reindeer is part of a family of three which is part of our new sparkling mirror foil range with twinkling effect lights.

The range includes cone trees, gift box decorations, stars, double sided wreaths and hanging balls, as well as reindeer and we think they look amazing.

And so did the kids!

It’s the sort of question that we get asked a lot more often than you would imagine!

This week we brought in Evie, one of our several occasional office dogs, to help give a definitive answer. Now, we know that any self respecting fan of the Big Bang Theory is going to say something along the lines of “a border collie is not a standard unit of measurement” but the point is this: by relating products to objects which we are familiar with, we can get a much better feel for how big they are in real life.

So, one of our 67mm baubles is around the same size as a tennis ball, or perhaps a large apple, while a 40cm bauble is smaller by a what is, visually at least, a surprisingly large amount – the same size as a ping pong ball. The bare numbers really don’t tell the story in a way our brains can handle very well!

By now, of course, you’re desperate to know the answer to the 10ft Christmas tree question. You could say 3m tall, but does that get us any further down the line? Not really.

What if we said: “a 10ft Christmas tree is about four and a half times the height of a border collie called Evie”.

Much better.

This project involved using some of our classic Christmas decorations, to show how simple decorating can be done in sports clubs, bars and hospitality venues. The venue for this particular display was Edinburgh Curling Club.

Our Home Range Icicle Lights and Micro Light Cascades are perfect for lifting any display with an eye-catching sparkle, especially when woven throughout festive greenery.

We offer a huge range of baubles, in a variety of colours, finishes and styles, which means there are options for just about any theme or setting. In this example, the combination of red, blue and ice blue baubles has been used to echo the markings on the curling rinks.

The newly refurbished clubhouse area features a modern design, complemented by our Green Cedar Garlands, to create a minimalist look whilst still delivering a classic festive feel.

We recently partnered with the Parklands Hotel, a 4 star boutique hotel located in the heart of Perth, to pull together a Christmas lights display that would enhance its traditional architecture and lovely gardens, while making it stand out in the city’s festive landscape.

As with any small to medium sized business, budget was highlighted as a concern, while the brief also featured a desire to “not go over the top”, to stick to a traditional upmarket look and feel, and to not tie up too much time on installation.

With this in mind, we opted for the timeless look of a warm white theme featuring a mix of our off-the-shelf Pro Series commercial grade lights.

Having spent an hour or so surveying the location, we decided to create a dramatic “avenue” of light leading up from the hotel car park to the main entrance. We did this by draping hedges with net lights and wrapping the trunks of the trees that defined the edge of the car park in our Pro Series string lights.

The Parklands Hotel boasts an excellent restaurant, with seating housed in a conservatory style setting, overlooking the lovely mature gardens to the front of the hotel. Perfect for icicle lights!

During our survey, we had noticed a very distinctive acer to the left of the main entrance.

With several diverging main branches at low level, it was a great candidate for wrapping string lights – something that always produces a dramatic talking point in any lights display. We used 10m lengths of string lights running from a multi-socket splitter at ground level.

Finally, the frontage of the hotel features a stone ledge at first floor level, which seemed to us perfect for running Pro Series cluster lights along, highlighting not only the main hotel entrance, but also the traditional architecture of the hotel frontage overall.

Combined with the existing festoon lights in the hotel garden, we loved the overall warmth and welcoming effect of what was, in reality, a relatively modest amount of lights, installed by 2 people in less than a morning.

We’re now approaching the end of January, and with the Christmas decorations down, our home can be left feeling empty and bare, but fairy lights are a great way to keep the warm glow in your home and garden long after the festivities have ended.
Here are a few of our favourite ways to incorporate the cosy glow of fairy lights into your home during the chilly, dark winter months.

Bringing Light to Your Home

You might be feeling like your interior is looking a bit bare once the festive decorations have been taken down, but a few simple touches really can make all the difference. Swap out the vibrant reds and greens from Christmas for warm white and light colours to keep it clean and fresh to start off the new year.

If you have a plain bookshelf, why don’t you hang some curtain lights to bring a touch of sparkle and illuminate those shelves. Or add them to your stairs for a nice radiance!

The Perfect Workspace

Let’s be honest, returning to work after the holidays is always hard and when the festivities are over we all feel like we need a little bit of cheering up again – I mean they literally call the third Monday in January ‘Blue Monday’, if that doesn’t say gloomy we don’t know what does.

With around one in seven adults working from home it’s likely you may have a home office, so why not brighten up that space to make it an environment you don’t mind working in. Ambient office lighting will make your space more welcoming and help to get you back into that productive mindset after your time off.

This could be as simple as replacing your festive tinsel with some low voltage festoons, or adding some battery lights to your shelves. For a home office space we recommend warm white for a subtle glow, that won’t distract you from your work.

Garden Lighting

Christmas may be long over but the dark nights certainly aren’t, so why not light up your outdoor space and create the perfect warm welcome to your home with fairy lights.

Wrap your trees with outdoor string lights, drape Festoons over a fence, or add a glow to your bushes with battery lights. These are all simple ideas to add a special touch to your garden during the darker winter months.

Did you know it actually costs less than you might think to run string lights? You can find out exactly how much will it cost you to run Christmas lights?