Light Up Your Yard This Holiday Season With These Ideas Inspired By Martha Stewart

There are a lot of ways to make your holiday season merry and bright, but what about your yard and garden? If you want it to be bright in a literal sense, you might be interested in creating some festive accent lighting projects. You can easily DIY garden lights out of Dollar Tree solar lights, but if that's not festive enough then we have some ideas you can try out, straight from Martha Stewart.

When it comes to Christmas decor inspired by celebrities, Stewart might be the first person you think of. She's been inspiring homeowners for several decades, and her holiday decor is often charming and easy to replicate or draw inspiration from. Two excellent ideas you should try this year from Stewart's website are paper luminary lanterns and a shooting star light display. While they look impressive, they're actually pretty simple. All you need for the luminarias are some paper bags, shaped hole punches, scissors, and electric tea lights (or candles). The shooting star requires string lights, a method to hang them, and either wire, wood, or something else star-shaped.

Luminarias date back to 16th century Mexico (including what later became New Mexico), where bonfires marked the end of the Las Posadas religious celebration. Paper lanterns lining driveways and lawns during the Christmas season became popular in the American Southwest in the 20th century. These paper lanterns are incredibly easy to customize, right from the supply stage. Martha Stewart uses red bags and a star-shaped hole punch, but you could use a different color and shape to really hone in on the parts of the holiday you love. Combine a blue bag and snowflake shapes or start with a green bag and use circles to represent ornaments. If you can't find a hole punch, use scissors or a craft knife to cut your own design (a template helps keep things consistent). If you don't like the way it looks, recycle that bag and try again!

Once you have your cut-outs how you like, add a light to the inside of the bag. An electric candle is ideal, since a real candle is a fire hazard. In windy areas, you can add rocks or sand to the bottom around the light to hold the bag down. If you already have electric lights lining your path, try cutting a hole in the bottom of each bags and slipping it over the lights. You can also try YouTuber Yo Creative Life's technique: They took sheets of paper, traced and cut out designs, then rolled them into cylinders and taped them together. Since the bottom of the cylinder is open, you can slip it over a light without issue. The downside is that it may be less stable, since it won't have as much surface area to balance on. Best to use them in areas protected from wind.

Between the two, the shooting star light display is the more complicated, but it's not so hard if you take it one step at a time. Begin by deciding where your display will go to be sure that it fits in the area you want. Plan where the light trails will go and add hooks to hang them from or stakes in the ground to attach them to. If you don't have something solid to hang the light trails from, consider this easy method to hang string lights using adjustable poles.

For the star, start with any star-shaped object that you can safely wrap lights around. You can make your own out of thick wire or create a wood frame. If you use wood, add nails or screws at each star tip and intersection to wrap or attach the lights to your star frame. You can wrap them however you like, but if you want the star to be outlined in lights you'll need to staple or tie the lights in place. Attach additional strands to the bottom of the star. Look for LED lights that allow several strands to be attached to each other and to a single plug. The number and length of the strands is up to you, but they should spread away from the star like a comet's tail. You can use twist ties to secure the lights in place, and don't forget to plug them in so that each strand is connected to the power source. Shake things up by using colorful or twinkling lights for the trail and white or yellow lights for the star itself!