Gifts for the person who goes all out on Christmas lights

600D fabric with a PVC lining, reinforced handles and three reels inside. Reels plus a bag is the combination that works; either alone does not.

The hour you spend in January decides the hour you spend in November. Lights thrown into a cardboard box come out as one object eleven months later, and untangling it is the worst job in the whole project.

The fix is reels inside a bag. Reels keep each run wound and separate; the bag keeps the reels together, keeps dust and rodents off, and survives being stacked on. HOLDN' STORAGE sells the combination: three reels inside a 600D bag with a PVC lining and reinforced handles.

Capacity is about 375 feet of string or cord, which is one average house. If you run a full roofline plus bushes plus a path, buy two and split them logically — roofline in one, ground-level in the other — so next November you carry up only what you need first.

One habit worth building: label each reel with where its run goes as you wind it. 'Front gutter, 4 sets' written on a piece of tape in January is worth twenty minutes next season.

Point it along the gutter, press the button, get the length. This turns the worst part of planning — measuring a roofline you cannot easily reach — into thirty seconds from the driveway.

Every planning question on this site starts with one number: how many feet of roofline you are lighting. Get it wrong and you either buy too little and stop mid-install, or too much and leave a box unopened.

Measuring it is the problem. A roofline is twenty feet up, usually interrupted by a gable, and measuring it with a tape means a ladder and a helper and a lot of repositioning. A laser measure does it from the driveway: aim along the gutter line, press once, read the number.

The GLM 20 reaches 65 feet and Bosch rates it to an eighth of an inch. Neither figure is the limiting factor here — for light planning you are rounding to the nearest foot anyway. What matters is that it is one button, because a tool with a menu is a tool you have to re-learn every November.

Two honest caveats. The dot is hard to see in bright daylight at range, so measure in the morning or on an overcast day. And a 30-foot tape plus somebody to hold the end costs nothing and works fine — this buys speed and safety, not a result you cannot otherwise get.

Three grounded outlets, 7-day programming and a 15-amp rating in one weatherproof box. The amp rating is the spec that matters and this one does not cut it fine.

Buy the timer before you buy the last set of lights. Switching a display on and off by hand at an outdoor outlet lasts about four days before everyone gives up and leaves them on all night, which triples the running cost and shortens the life of everything.

The spec that decides a timer is its amp rating, and most people never look at it. An outdoor circuit is typically 15 amps. A timer rated at 10 amps plugged into that circuit is a 10-amp ceiling on your display whatever the breaker says, and exceeding it is how timers fail — often by welding their relay closed, which is a timer that never turns off again.

This DEWENWILS unit is rated 15 A with three grounded outlets and 7-day programming, and it is UL Listed. That last point deserves attention: certification is not universal in cheap outdoor timers, and it is the difference between a tested product and an untested one carrying your whole display.

Practical advice: program it indoors, on the kitchen table, before it goes outside. Digital timer interfaces are all bad, and they are worse in gloves, in the dark, at 25 degrees.

Three outlets also means one timer instead of three, which matters because each outdoor timer is itself a thing to weatherproof.

Proper metal tie-downs for inflatables and yard decorations. This is the cheapest meaningful upgrade in outdoor Christmas decorating and almost nobody makes it until after something blows over.

Every inflatable comes with stakes, and the stakes it comes with are the cheapest part of the package. They are molded plastic, six to eight inches, and they hold fine on a still night.

The night they do not hold is the one where a front comes through at 2:00 am, and by morning a twelve-foot inflatable is across the street. That is the standard inflatable failure and it is entirely preventable for a few dollars.

Proper metal tie-down stakes go deeper, resist pull-out, and do not snap. Six of them will re-anchor most single inflatables; a large unit wants more than six and wants them at the corners rather than evenly spaced.

Two practical notes. Mark where you put them — a metal stake left in a lawn is a mower problem in April. And they will not drive into frozen ground, so anchor early in the season before the first hard freeze, not after.

A swivel-and-lock bulb gripper, so the bulb points where you set it instead of where gravity puts it. On a gutter run with mixed bulb types, that control is worth the price difference.

Here is the problem a swivel clip solves. Along a gutter, C9 bulbs should stand straight up. Around a corner and down a rake, they should lie along the line. With a fixed-angle clip you get one of those two and fight the other.

Adams' Deluxe clip has a gripper that swivels and then locks. You set the bulb angle per clip, which means the gutter run stands up and the rake run lies flat, from one bag of clips. On a house with corners, dormers and a garage return — which is most houses — that is the difference between a display that looks installed and one that looks draped.

Adams lists compatibility across mini, C5, C6, C7, C9, C12, G-series globes and rope, which is the widest range on this page. If you run globe bulbs anywhere, this is one of very few clips that grips them properly.

They cost more than a plain universal clip. For a small display the plain clip is fine and we would not upsell you. For a large mixed display where the bulb angle changes several times, the control pays for itself in how the finished run reads from the street.