Households and businesses around the country celebrate the holidays with a decoration that is at once tacky and charming: Christmas lights. Their colors are synonymous with good cheer and revelry, which many business owners believe also translates into higher sales. But standard incandescent lights can be costly to buy, run, and replace. For all their advantages in spreading cheer, it seems there are few economic advantages to the light unless they directly translate into a sale or nice big gift. First of all, they are not inexpensive to buy in the first place. Second, when one bulb gives, most strings have to be entirely replaced. Third, they don’t last very long; and last, they use a lot of energy which is both expensive and bad for the environment.

But one needn’t be a Grinch to be kind to both wallet and earth while spreading holiday cheer. LED Christmas lights spread cheer to their viewers and their users because they produce a more brilliant light with less energy and can last for 20 years while most incandescent strings generally last 2 years and 3 years at most. The key to the difference is that while incandescent strings use incandescent bulbs – which lose a lot of energy in the process of converting electricity to light in the tungsten filaments – LED strings use light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which convert almost all of their current into usable light.

In addition to being friendly on the wallet – LED Christmas lights cost only a few dollars more per string than comparable incandescent varieties –  they are also safer than incandescent strings. Every year, dozens of homes across the country burn, the victim of dry Christmas tries and hot incandescent bulbs. LEDs emit almost no heat at all, making them a safe choice not only for those who might forget to water their tree after the big day, but also for anyone with kids or pets that might be attracted to the string of otherwise hot light bulbs.

The gradual reduction in the cost of producing LED strings for holidays over the past decade or so make buying them a very easy decision. For those running lights 8-10 hours per day around the holidays, the savings on electricity may pay for the difference between the price of incandescent and LED within a season or two – and string can last 4 or 5 times as long.