Need ideas for holiday lighting as we head into a new season of celebration? Check out this guest post from our lighting division, AMC Illumination! And don’t forget, we can always help with exterior painting projects — and pre-holiday interior projects. Give us a call if you need a fresh coat!
Holiday Lighting Ideas for Every Season
Do you have permanent exterior soffit lighting? Are you excited about all the possibilities for holiday lighting? While our AMC Illumination customers love the more practical side of their system, we also know there’s a feature they enjoy more than any other — decorating their home for the holidays!
One of the beautiful things about permanent soffit lighting is its versatility. With access to millions of color options (which you can coordinate using an app on your smartphone), the possibilities are nearly endless. In fact, the hardest decision for homeowners will be choosing a final combination. Fortunately, only the lighting itself is permanent. The color? Well, that’s always up to you.
We’ve broken our list of holiday lighting ideas down into seasons to make it easier to navigate. Read on to get inspiration for decorating with your permanent soffit lighting.
Fall Festivities — Holiday Lighting Ideas for the Season of Change
It’s hard to compete with the massive color changes that fall tends to bring, but you have one advantage the trees don’t: Your colors show up at night! There are lots of reasons to celebrate in the fall and we certainly love having a way to add a little illumination to those early sunsets.
Here are a few great ways to light up the night in autumn:
- Reflect Fall Foliage — Why should the pumpkins and leaves have all the fun? Harness golds, oranges and reds to create your own homage to autumn foliage.
- Sport School Colors — Show off your back-to-school pride or support your local team with the school colors.
- Kick Off Football Season — Got a friendly rivalry with your neighbor up the street? Forget yard flags and bumper stickers. Deck your house in the team colors during games.
- Host a Haunting Halloween — You can go with a classic black and orange color scheme for Halloween or leverage some of the blues and purples to create a spooky ambiance for trick-or-treaters.
- Support Veterans Day — Deck your house in red, white and blue in honor of United States veterans.
- Serve Up a Cozy Thanksgiving — Bring back the colors of the harvest to welcome the family home, or create a cozy ambiance to make guests feel those home fires burning!
Glowing in a Winter Wonderland — Permanent Christmas Lights
If there’s a season where exterior lighting can really shine, it’s definitely winter. People take holiday lighting very seriously when the first few notes of Christmas music start playing in the stores. In fact, adding permanent Christmas lighting is one of the key reasons many homeowners invest in soffit lighting in the first place. People love the idea of being able to decorate by making a few selections on the app. No ladders, no staples, no burned out bulbs or squirrel-chewed wires!
Let’s shed some light on our favorite holiday decorating ideas with permanent soffit lighting:
- Classic Christmas Colors — The easiest way to create that real Christmas feel is to select the most recognizable colors of the season. Alternate red and green, give a nod to Santa with classic red and white or use all three colors together.
- Home for the Holidays — A warm white can be just as effective as any more traditional color combination. White lighting looks especially pretty with snow — like your own special ice castle.
- Gingerbread Lane — Deck the halls with colorful flair, just like those fun gingerbread houses the kids love to make each season.
- Icy Paradise — If you want a more ethereal look for your holiday decor, you can also try shades of blue to create a frosty feel.
- New Year’s Eve — Go for the gold or create a colorful, celebratory look and feel with vibrant colors to ring in the New Year.
- Super Bowl — It’s the biggest game of the year for football fans, even if your team doesn’t make it all the way. Show where your loyalties lie (and make it easy to find your tailgate party) with team colors.
- Valentine’s Day — Red and white? Pink and white? Some combination of the three? Show off how much you love love with these familiar hues.
Spring into Color — Exterior Lighting Ideas for Refreshing and Renewing Your Home
Spring is a season of growth and renewal. The days are getting longer, but there’s still plenty of night to really enjoy your lighting and decor. While spring doesn’t have the same huge expectations for holiday lighting that winter does, you’ll still find a lot of reasons to celebrate with custom lighting.
Some ideas include:
- Celebrate St. Patrick’s — If you want your house to go green for St. Patrick’s Day, you’ll certainly have plenty of options to choose from. With millions of colors, you have endless options for creating that perfect shamrock green.
- Easter Egg Excellence — Create the ultimate pastel collage for the Easter holiday, from pale pinks and soft yellows, to spring greens and robin’s egg blues.
- Shine for Spring Break — Have a kid coming home for Spring Break? Give them a taste of their home away from home with the school colors.
- Earth Day — Set the house aglow with greens and blues to show off your love of the planet.
- Go Grads — Speaking of school colors, you can easily show any grad in your life that you care with your lighting. Plus, it will help guests find any parties you might be hosting.
Bright Nights and Summer Vibes — Glowing through the Season
The days may be longer in the summer, but your lighting will still get its own chance to shine once the sun goes down. In fact, it can become one of your home’s best features when it comes to evening entertaining. You can not only decorate with your soffit lighting, but also use it to give ambiance and illumination for those nights out on the deck or around the fire pit.
Check out these top summer lighting ideas:
- Salute Independence Day — Celebrate the 4th of July with red, white and blue before and after the fireworks shows. You can even dim your lights or turn them off from anywhere using the app.
- Happy Pride — Millions of colors mean millions of ways to show your pride with a celebratory rainbow.
- Honor Juneteenth — Combine greens, reds and yellows to show your support for the Juneteenth holiday.
- BBQ Glow-up — Create the perfect summer atmosphere with just the right amount of brightness and light for your parties, barbecues and any other celebration.
- Root for the Home Team — Baseball season offers you 162 opportunities to show off your team spirit.
Other Ways to Decorate with Permanent LED Lighting
Color isn’t the only way to create holiday decor with permanent LED lighting. You can also leverage some pretty cool features built into your lighting system to create high-impact decor — from the comfort of your couch.
Brightness Control
Do you want a warm glow or a bright beacon? You set the mood for your exteriors!
Effects
The effects offered by modern soffit lighting are better than the string lights you can buy at the big box store. Even better, you don’t have to install them yourself. Check out some of the options for animated lighting. You’re sure to see some similarities with the portable string lights. (You can also check for pre-loaded themes).
- Chase
- Twinkle
- Fade
- Sparkle
- Pulse
- Wave
- Glow
Timers
Create blocks of time for your holiday pride to glow. Then, shift to practical security lighting once everyone has gone to bed.
We love how these extra features create all the ambiance and atmosphere of the classic string lights we’ve all grown up with — but do it better than ever before. You can get the twinkle lights, the racing colors, the glow and fade and all of your favorite patterns and colors without ever scaling a ladder or checking a single bulb. Best of all, when you’re not celebrating or changing colors just for the fun of it, you can have a classic glow that illuminates your home, boosting overall safety, supporting your security cameras and giving your home a sophisticated curb appeal.
Discover How You Can Light Up Your Holidays with Permanent Soffit Lighting
We hope these lighting ideas have inspired you to create amazing holiday displays with your soffit lighting. If you haven’t invested in soffit lighting yet, but this list has you curious about your options, give us a call! AMC Illumination offers complimentary estimates, That way, you can get the full picture of your project. No surprises, from the first assessment to the final walkthrough.
