September 1, 2026 · 4 min read

Holiday lighting or permanent lighting? How to choose what fits your house

Seasonal C9s we hang and store, a year-round system built into the trim, or a lit landscape. The right answer starts with two questions, not a catalog.

A pillared estate at night with warm white rooflines, lit garland wrapping the columns, and blue accent lighting by the entry.

Professional exterior lighting sorts into three programs: seasonal holiday lighting that goes up in November and comes down in January, permanent lighting built into the trim that runs all year, and landscape lighting for everything below the roofline. They get shopped as if they were one product, and they are not. Before any catalog talk, two questions settle most of it: when do you want the light, and what do you want lit?

Start with when you want the light

December only, and you never want to touch a ladder: seasonal holiday lighting.
Every night of the year, from holiday patterns to a quiet warm white: permanent lighting.
Summer evenings on the patio and a lit path to the door: landscape lighting, on its own or alongside either of the others.

Seasonal holiday lighting: ours, stored, and rehung

Our seasonal program is not a box of lights you buy. Commercial-grade LEDs are custom cut to your roofline, we install them, we repair any bulb that goes out during the season, we take everything down in January, and we store it all until next year. Your garage stays empty and the lights are our problem, not yours.

It also photographs the way holiday lights are supposed to: bulbs tracing the peaks, wreaths and garland where they belong, trees wrapped trunk to tip. If the goal is the house everyone slows down for in December, this is the program.

A two-story home outlined in warm white bulbs with a bare tree wrapped from trunk to branch tips, boulders and a lit bed along the drive. — A seasonal install: roofline C9s, with the birch wrapped from trunk to branch tips.

Permanent lighting: the year-round system

Permanent lighting is a low-profile track with app-controlled bulbs, installed once along the roofline and run from your phone. Holiday patterns in December, team colors on game day, a soft single color for an ordinary Tuesday, or nothing at all. The track comes in finishes that blend with your trim, so by day the house just looks like the house.

A stucco two-story home at dusk with permanent lighting running red, green and warm white along every roofline and dormer. — Permanent track running a holiday pattern on a summer evening. The giveaway that it never comes down.

Down-facing or out-facing: the fork that sets the look

Within permanent lighting, the biggest decision is which way the light points, and it changes the character of the house more than any color choice does.

Down-facing fixtures sit up in the soffit and aim down the wall. You see a wash of light on the siding, not the bulbs themselves. This is the architectural look: quiet, expensive-feeling, closer to landscape lighting than to Christmas lights.
Out-facing bulbs mount on the drip edge and face the street, a run of bright points along every roofline. This is the traditional holiday-light look, readable from a distance, without the ladder every November.
Light bars run one continuous line with no visible dots, the neon look. They belong on storefronts, signage, and modern elevations where a row of points would read wrong.

A close view of a permanent puck light seated flush into a white soffit, its three diodes visible behind the lens. — A down-facing puck seated flush in the soffit. By day you see trim, not fixtures.

The two can share one system. An out-facing roofline for the street with a down-facing wash at the entry or a gable gives the house depth instead of just an outline.

Landscape lighting: the ground level

Roofline programs light the house. Landscape lighting lights everything the house sits in: warm path lights on the way to the door, spots aimed up into the trees so the canopy glows from inside, washers across a facade, bistro strings over the patio. It comes in two builds, classic low-voltage warm light or app-controlled color, and it pairs with either roofline program or stands alone.

Square bollard lights spaced along the edge of a lawn at dusk, throwing warm pools over bark beds, ornamental grasses and clipped shrubs. — Warm path light along the beds, the ground level doing its own work.

How to actually decide

You want December magic with zero maintenance: seasonal holiday lighting.
You want the house lit every night and holidays handled from the couch: permanent, out-facing.
You want architecture, not decoration: permanent, down-facing.
You have a modern or commercial elevation: light bars.
You live outside all summer: landscape lighting first, roofline second.

Whichever program fits, the structure is the same: we design it, install it, and repair it, and the lights are our responsibility, not a project in your garage.

Every program, with photos of real installs around the Eastside:

See the GlowWorks programs

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