My All-Time Favorite Holiday Decoration is Now SO EASY
When I was growing up, we had these little electric candles that we’d put in all the front windows of our house at Christmas. One of my favorite things to do was go to bed, when my bed was nice and warm and it was freezing cold outside (bonus points if it was snowing), and be allowed to keep my window candle on until I fell asleep.
Back then our candles each had to plug into an outlet, and each evening one of my parents would go to each window and plug in the candle, and then unplug them before bed. I cannot express how much I loved having these candles in the windows, but now that I’m an adult it sounds so obnoxious to plug each individual candle in and then turn them off 5 hours later. And we lived on a corner! We had so many windows!
I decided last Christmas that this year, when I lived in my new house, I was going to get candles for my windows. But now we’re living in the future, and window candles are battery powered LEDs on timers. No plugging in each one. You don’t even have to turn them on, you just wait and every night you have lovely “candlelight” in each of your windows.
I bought these ones, at Target. They’re $5 each full price, but I got them on sale for $4 each. There are many, many versions of this type of decoration sold all over, but I’ve never seen a deal like $4 each (which came out to $24 for my whole house).
Any time I want to show the scale of something I use an iPhone, because we all have different sized spoons or whatever, but we’re all at least familiar with iPhones (this one is an 8).
They stay on for 6 hours and off for 18, so you just turn them all on at the time you’d like them to come on in your windows. I laid out all 6 candles, and put batteries in each of them (each candle takes 3 AA batteries, and I’ve never been so glad to be a person who buys batteries in bulk). Then, at 4pm, I sat at my kitchen table and turned each candle (which I had in front of me, this is important) to timer mode. THEN I put each candle in a window. If you put them in the window, and then turn each on one by one, you’ll have the same effect as when one of my parents had to plug each light in - every candle turning on at a different time over the course of 5-10 minutes. My candles don’t all turn on in unison, but they all turn on within a minute.
The lights are LEDs, so the bulbs should last a long time. I plan on taking out the batteries and putting them all in a bag with the candles when I store them after the season is over. Overall, it’s an easy way to recreate one of my favorite childhood Christmas memories - certainly easier than it was for my parents decades ago.
