DIY CHRISTMAS DECORATING – 

How to Decorate an Evergreen Tree or Bush for Christmas

Chances are you have at least one evergreen tree or bush to decorate at your home or business. Check out our how-to professional Christmas light installation tips video below for a few tips and tricks from the professional Christmas decorators.

More into reading than watching? That’s ok The Christmas Guys understand and while the video will be more helpful for your DIY Christmas decorations below is a transcript of the video.

Hi, Matt here with The Christmas Guys™ to do a professional Christmas light installation how to decorate an evergreen bush, some might call this a tree, I call it a bush. First thing you want to do is always just test your lights so you know what you’re up against. It’s a little hard in the bright sun, I don’t know, you probably can’t see but these lights, this strand is all on and it is working, um theoretically. Let’s see if we can test another one and again we always test all the lights just to make sure they’re all working. Yup and those ones work too. There you can see them in the shade there. They’re working that they’re on. Yeah so once you test all of them, I’m going to go ahead and test them now. You don’t have to watch me test all of them but. All right and then when you want to start decorating we like to do a little, a little safety loop on the extension cord just to make sure that it stays put. We’re using C9 type lights here and you want to start at the bottom somewhere. And just start laying them. As you go what works the best is you kind of get them on the tree or the bush so their not falling off and then you can always go back through and reposition them to make it have the look that you’re looking for. I obviously plugged in the wrong set of lights here. This brings up the good point with Christmas light tangles when you do have them, just very gently pull them apart. Because if you put them away correctly at the end of the year, they’re actually just getting stuck on each other really, it’s not a full-blown tangle. So if you just lightly pull, again you’re just separating. These bulbs have these little clips and stuff on them so sometimes they get stuck on each other or the wires, and we’re actually using a really long run here, there’s the end. With C9s when you’re decorating you don’t have to do a full tight wrap in your hands to hold the lights because C9s are just larger and it’s easier and less tangles if you do a larger swoop with them. All right once you’re good to go then you’re going to walk around the tree. Choose the direction you want to go. It does not matter if it’s counterclockwise or clockwise, whatever you’re feeling. And again the first time you go around you going to just set them in the tree a little bit on the bottom to make sure they’re going to hang. And you just want to go all the way around the tree, I like to do it about 1 and a quarter, 1 and half times so at the very front where you first start you have 2 passes going that you can kind of look at to judge your spacing how you want. So once I get to that point, here I have 2 strands in the front, it’s obviously a little harder to see during the day, at night time they all shine through. So here’s the bottom and here’s the second and that’s about an 8-inch gap. So there is where you have to choose how dense you want your tree. A really nice dense is about a hand width or about 7 inches apart. You don’t have to be perfect all the way around with 7 inches if you’re going for the you know nice dense tree you want to be close to it all the way around to give it uniformity. You can do it if you want it less dense obviously go about 10 inches or even 12 if you want. And if you want to do a supersaturation I would probably recommend mini lights but you can do it with the C9 type bulbs and you want to do maybe 5 or 4-inch gap, so that’s all you do. You just keep going around the tree getting some strands on and again once you get that first couple set up where you know you want them I like to hold my hand down and kind of just feed the lights through and put it wherever I think. It should go. And do this with time you get a little better, and each tree is a little different obviously. Again so now I have a couple on there again, a couple wraps going around the tree, you want to take a step back and make sure, obviously, this is a huge gap right here compared to right down here. This one I’m actually going to move up a little bit, it’s a little close for what I want, and then I’m going to move this one down a little bit. So it’s easy once they are up on the tree, just reposition them as long as you haven’t done a whole bunch. If you’ve done a whole bunch of wraps it’s not easy to reposition them where you want them. So every couple times you want to go around and then move down, again once they’re on the tree is going to grab them so you can just scooch them down. And right there’s perfect for what I’m looking for on this evergreen. And then you just continue this process all the way up one strand at a time. When we connect the second strand of lights and every set of lights going forward you’re going to want to piggyback them, with LED you can do an obscene amount of lights end to end. With incandescent anywhere from 3 to 7 depending on the type of lights. So what I’m doing here is wrap, maybe another one, so 2 wraps I’m going to go plug it in. You want to be careful you don’t rip this wire out when you’re doing that. So this way they won’t come disconnected while you’re decorating or throughout the year. Sometimes when you’re decorating you might pull out a male end out of the female and then you’ll lose a strand of lights and it’ll be difficult to figure out why. And you’ll give yourself a little heartache so that little wrap there prevents that. Well, this is how you decorate an evergreen tree. For more information you can visit the Christmas guy dot com or feel free to call or text us at 518712XMAS that’s 5187129627 and I’m Matt with The Christmas Guys™ see you soon and Merry Christmas.

Don’t forget if you have any questions regarding Christmas light installation please don’t hesitate to ask below.