Light up!

Dust off your Santa statues, make sure all the batteries in your electric holiday trinkets are good to go and be sure to plug in your lights to see if they're all working and blinking.

And if you've always wanted to decorate your home on the outside in the spirt of the Christmas season, go ahead. Chances are small that you'll see your festive actions on your December electric bill.

"Bigger things that affect the bills in December have to do with electric heating. A lot of people in town plug in strip heaters to supplement their gas for instance," Bob Stevenson, general manager at the Hannibal Board of Public Works, said. "That probably has a way bigger effect on electric bills than the lights."

However, unless you decorate like Clark Griswald (from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation) or John Freiling of rural Hannibal, you will see a spike in your electric bill.

Freiling, who does technical work for the James O'Donnell Funeral Home, sets up a half-mile home display along Carrs Lane each Christmas season. It's run entirely by computer and he has his own FM station for drivers to listen to as they pass by.

"In my case, it definitely goes up," Freiling said. "We put up almost half a million lights, so our bill goes up from an average $250 to almost $1,000."

And even though Freiling's many illuminated displays, trails of messages and candy canes raises his electric bill, he said it's an increase he said he doesn't mind at all.

Stevenson said those getting into the holiday spirit shouldn't worry about their own bills when it comes to decorating outside.

"A hundred-watt strand of lights will burn for about 10 hours for nine cents. If you had 100 of those strands around your house — which would be a lot — it'd be $9 an hour," Stevenson said. "A hundred watts for an hour is 9/10 of a cent. So if you had 10 of those strands, you'd have 1000 watts. It's really pretty cheap."
It's also the choice of Christmas lights that can result in different energy usage numbers.

"The way to go nowadays is LED," Freiling said. "They use about 10 percent of a regular light bulb. Your miniature light bulbs would be next and then the worst offenders are the C-7s and the C-9s. A C-9 is the old fashioned outdoor type of light and a C-7's kind of the old fashioned indoor.

"The LEDs are much better. They don't fade, the light they generate is pure light and it actually generates that color of light. They last for a long time and there's filament in them, so if you drop the bulb it's not going to hurt it."