Holiday Hacks: Ideas for outdoor decorations

GREEN BAY, Wis. (WBAY) - It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but you don’t have to be a Griswold to make a memorable Christmas display. We spent hours on YouTube -- we told the boss it was “for work” -- to select some of the most useful, easy-to-follow videos filled with ideas for outdoor displays.

We looked for ideas that your neighbor wouldn’t have in their yard, had a lot of “wow factor” without a lot of money, and didn’t require specialized tools that would never come out of that drawer in your house (you know the one) until next year. So we hope you look at these projects and say “I could do that” and maybe get the family involved, too. We hope you got a glue gun for Christmas last year.

Giant ornaments Try a variety of colors that match the ornaments on your tree. One video made Santa’s belt ornaments using red play balls, painting a black midsection, and adding a gold-painted square made with craft sticks.

Create a Candy Land in your yard with pool noodles (Hint: Use a low-temperature setting on the glue gun to avoid melting the pool noodle. If you don’t have rubber bands large enough, you could try two or three wraps of twine in the north/south - east/west directions or a string of zip ties).

Wall snowflakes Don’t want to pay $40 or even $80 for a large snowflake to hang outside your house? These are made from 16 plastic hangers from a dollar store. Slightly more advanced, check out this video that adds lights to turn snowflakes into Christmas stars.

Life-size nutcrackers This could certainly be a family project. The video below shows you what you need, but for people with a little more skill and patience you could try these advanced creations. Don’t want to use so many buckets? Here’s a couple who uses PVC pipes and the cardboard forming tubes for concrete.

Light-up arches Decorate your driveway or sidewalk with some rebar, PVC pipe, and Christmas light strands. We really liked what this man did in his neighborhood (the video ends with the best reveal we saw among the many videos we looked at. Note to content creators: If you’re going to spend hours on a project with Christmas lights, show them at night). If you want a fancier arch with synchronized lights, we figure most people don’t have a spare Arduino microcontroller, which doesn’t meet our goal of simpler projects, but it’s amazing what you can do using LED strip lights.

Lighted Christmas tree frames We also saw many videos for Christmas tree frames, but we liked that this video experiments with a few different ways to get the same result. One of them might suit your needs and abilities.

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