Let there be light! – MoneyMagpie

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Christmas is a time of light. Christmas lights, twinkling lights at home, outside Christmas lights, candles and mood lighting – it’s all about light.

So we’ve looked around to find some bright, attractive, mood-enhancing and good value light-producers to make your Christmas full of light, whether you’re on your own or with friends and family.

Create great mood lighting in your home

It doesn’t take a lot to make a Christmassy mood in your home with just a few lights.

• Look for old candles in drawers and shelves, display them in jam jars that the kids can paint or put stickers on to make them look more like Christmas
• Buy tea-lights (£7.99 for 50 at Amazon) and put them around the table on saucers surrounded by holly or ivy or other pretty sprigs of berries you have picked up on walks
• Set up a candle ‘winter shelfie’: gather up all the sold candles that you have an arrange them on a shelf, or on the mantlepiece, with pine cones, arranged prettily. Pick some branches of pine to display behind the candle arrangement to put greenery behind the white candles and brown pine cones. You could even spray some of the cones in gold or silver to add some glamour!
• Grab an old, glass bowl (maybe one of those cut ones that your mum used to use), fill with some soil and top with moss, pine cones and odd Christmas decorations that you don’t know what to do with (baubles without their hook, a Father Christmas that should go on a cake…that sort of thing) and arrange around some tall dinner candles that you fix into the earth. Display on the dinner table.

Indoor Christmas lights

Northern Lights Colour Fire Cones RRP: £14.99 from Lakeland. This is a lovely way to bring additional lighting into your home in an atmospheric way.  Coming in a pack of 30 to 40 cones and suitable for any real-flame fire, drop 2 or 3 into the flames of your fire and watch the blues and greens of the Northern Lights come to life.

Lights don’t just belong on the tree, use them around your home or to decorate your Christmas table. Lakelands Star Cluster Lights RRP: £19.99 and Snowflake String Lights RRP: £11.99 (currently on offer £9.99 while stocks last) are perfect to add that festive glow to your space for you, friends and family to enjoy.

Lakeland have a great range of Christmas lights to choose from. Our favourites include the Christmas Car String Lights and Light Up Ribbon. Both battery operated, you won’t have any issues in trying to reach the plug socket. RRP: £14.99 each. 

How to bring inner light into your life

The long, dark nights of mid-winter can make us feel miserable if we allow it.

I used to complain about it endlessly and I hear people talking about how the long  nights make them depressed and afraid.

But do we have to have this unhappiness? Really. I’m serious – do we really have to?

I’ve learnt over the years that much of this unhappiness really is unnecessary. After all, thinking of the Scandinavian countries – they have a lot more darkness than we do and they manage to make the most of it. Cosiness, getting comfortable, cuddling up to friends and family or enjoying cosy time at home alone, are all ways of making the most of the long nights.

But event more than that, it’s an opportunity to discover light that isn’t material and isn’t affected by where the sun happens to be.

Remember, the Scriptures say “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” but it didn’t say there was a sun or even stars – it was just light. 

Do you know anyone who just lights up a room? Someone who just somehow is light? That person can be you. Light is light and you can find it – maybe with a fair amount of effort – by determinedly looking away from the dark thoughts, the gloomy reminiscences, the critical and downbeat thoughts, to actual loving thoughts, thoughts that look for the good and thoughts that are not centred in the body or things or what you think you’ve lost.

Light really is here now, even if we don’t seem to be able to see it just yet. But we can turn to the light – and actually be the light – when dark thoughts tempt us to be down. Accepting the fact that Light is here and is real, actually filling the universe,  it’s easier to express light ourselves.

Try it each time the darkness has a go at taking over your thought. Persisting with it will work, just as switching on a light in a room instantly dispels the darkness. It can’t hold out against light.