Find high quality Christmas lights

What should I look for in buying pre-lit trees?

Color+Clear®

Multicolored

Clear

Prelit trees are now extremely popular both to save the time and hassle of stringing your own Christmas tree and because (high quality) prelit Christmas trees are professionally strung to minimize dangling wires.  Most manufacturers provide a wide variety of options including clear lights, multicolored lights, and other configurations.  For example, Balsam Hill® offers its premium Color+Clear® lights that allow you to change the lights from clear, to multicolor, or both with a click of a remote control. 

If you are considering a prelit tree, once again you want to judge the quality of the lights by both the number of lights and the quality of the lights.  In general, we recommend at least 100 lights per foot of the tree. For example, a 7.5 foot tree should have at least 750 lights. If you comparison shop, you will likely find that Balsam Hill® has many more lights per foot than most other Christmas trees.  

To ensure that you are getting high quality Christmas lights, make sure the lights are UL® approved and are designed to stay lit even when one light burns out.  There are several levels of quality when it comes to "when one light burns out, the rest remain lit ": the very best lights actually let you remove a bulb and the rest will stay lit. These lights are much more expensive than standard "when one bulb burns out the rest remain lit" lights, and are used very infrequently on artificial Christmas trees due to their high cost.

Of course, as you would expect, our Balsam Hill trees feature the very best lights - you may remove a bulb and the rest will stay lit. (The exception to this is that some clearance items are standard lights and all of our indoor/outdoor light items such as wreaths, garlands, and potted trees feature standard lights). Often times you can judge the quality of the lights based on the length of the warranty; just make sure that the company who is selling you the pre-lit Christmas tree is the company that backs up the warranty to avoid being passed on to a third party.

If you are considering LED lights, keep in mind that most LED lights do not emit the warm, soft glow typically associated with indoor Christmas lights. Balsam Hill® now offers a new type of LED lights on some of its trees. These premium LEDs are available as warm-white Candlelight™ LEDs and multi-colored LEDs, both of which provide the warm Christmas glow desired by the majority of our customers.