Christmas Lights, originally uploaded by Giant Ginkgo.

Last night, hubby came to me with a pensive look on his face and said, "please don't be mad, but I bought some Christmas lights". Now, I'm not the kind of person who gets mad very often. He started the sentence that way as he knew that I was trying to cut down on our household's general purchasing and consumption of things and but in this particular case, I even said, "cool!".

It's that time of the year where there are magnificent displays of Christmas lights on people's houses, gardens and in and on shopping malls. As much as I love Christmas lights, they have traditionally been bad for the environment in terms of the energy usage.

The good thing is that we can still have our Christmas lights and be energy efficient! Modern Christmas lights now use LEDs, which can use up to 95% less energy than their inefficient predecessors. They can also last up to ten times longer. Think of the savings on your energy bill!

Nowadays, most stores only sell the LED Christmas lights but many families still have lights that are years old. Have a think about upgrading your lights to the more efficient LED Christmas lights. For some more information, check out this quick guide to LED Christmas Lights.

Now for the reason why I said "cool!" about the lights Alastair bought? Not only are they LED lights, but they're solar powered LED lights! I love this idea of using the sun to generate power. I'm not sure how well these will work in the parts of the world where there's lots of snow and not enough sun, but it should work really well in Australia. You can pick some up on the Aussie eBay for about $15 for a string of 60 lights. Or check out Homesite's article about Environmentally friendly Christmas lights (which seems to have a higher price range of these lights).