About this guide

Holiday Lights Guide is a free directory of Christmas light displays in the United States — the free neighbourhood houses that go all out, the synchronised music displays, the drive-thru trails, and the ticketed attractions. It currently covers 1,334 displays across 496 towns in 25 states, 1,177 of them free to visit.

Why it exists

The best Christmas lights in most towns are on residential streets. Those displays have no Google Maps listing, no website and no opening hours page, so searching "Christmas lights near me" tends to return ticketed attractions and little else. The houses that people actually drive across town to see are scattered across local news roundups, Facebook groups and parenting blogs — a different one for every neighbourhood, most of them written once and never updated.

This site pulls those together, checks them, and adds the things a single article cannot: what else is nearby, what order to drive them in, and what time it actually gets dark where you are.

What we add

For 112 towns we work out a full driving loop of every display, with mileage and a time estimate. For every town we compute local sunset and full-dark times for December, because "after dusk" means 4:12 PM in Boston and 5:33 PM in Miami on the very same evening. Every listing shows what else is within five miles, and how many independent sources confirm it.

The full detail is on our methodology page — where listings come from, what we verify, what we compute, and what we knowingly get wrong.

Who runs it

Holiday Lights Guide is an independent site run by a single editor, not a media company. There is no newsroom and no sponsor. If you want to reach a human about a listing, a correction, or a takedown, email us — it comes straight to the person who maintains the database.

Homeowners: if your display is listed and you would rather it were not, tell us and we will remove it the same week, no questions asked. That has always been the policy and always will be.

How it is funded

The guide is free to use and carries display advertising. Nobody pays to be listed, and no listing is ranked, promoted or removed because of advertising. See the privacy policy for how ads and analytics work.

Season 2026

Listings carry the season they were last confirmed for. The full database is re-verified each October, ahead of the season. If you spot something out of date before we do, let us know.