There is a specific kind of tree standing in front yards all over the Chicago suburbs: a blue spruce or a white pine planted in the seventies as a five-foot nursery specimen, now thirty-five feet tall and wider than the garage.
Lighting mature evergreens like these is the single highest-impact move available to most Chicagoland homeowners — and it's also where the most money gets wasted, because an evergreen doesn't behave like anything else on the property. You can't wrap it the way you'd wrap a maple trunk. You can't reach it from a stepladder. And the approach that looks right on a six-foot arborvitae looks absurd on a forty-foot spruce.
Here's how evergreens are actually lit, species by species.
Why evergreens are different
A deciduous tree in December is a bare structure — trunk, scaffold branches, twigs — and light describes that structure directly. That's why a wrapped honey locust or linden reads so cleanly from the street.
An evergreen is a solid mass. There's no visible internal structure to trace; there's a surface. So lighting an evergreen is a question of how you treat a shape, not how you follow a skeleton.
That leads to a completely different set of decisions, and three genuinely different methods.
The three ways to light an evergreen
Surface wrapping. Light applied to the outer surface, following the cone from the base upward, spacing set by the tree's diameter at each level. Reads as a fully lit tree from a distance. It's the most labor-intensive method, and on anything above fifteen feet it needs lift or extension equipment.
Vertical drops. Strings run from a point near the top, straight down the outside to the base, spaced evenly around the circumference. Faster, uses less material, and reads as a striking radial pattern rather than a solid glow. Excellent on very tall pines where full wrapping is impractical.
Netting. A grid dropped over the canopy. It's fast and even, and it's the right tool for shrubs and small dense conifers — under roughly eight feet. On a big spruce it does not work; the net cannot conform to that much irregular volume, and it looks exactly like what it is.
Most large evergreens in places like Barrington, Wheaton, or Homer Glen end up as some combination — surface wrapping on the lower, most visible third, with drops carrying the height.
Species by species
Blue spruce and Norway spruce
The best evergreen there is for holiday lighting, and the most common large specimen across the Chicago suburbs. Strong conical form, stiff branches that hold light where you put it, and dense enough that the tree glows rather than showing individual strings.
Blue spruce has a genuinely blue-grey cast, and it interacts with color temperature. Warm white on blue spruce produces a lovely soft contrast. Cool white pushes it toward a stark, almost silver look — which some people love and others find cold. It's worth deciding deliberately rather than by default.
The catch is access. Spruce branches start low and go out wide, so getting to the trunk means going through skirt branches. This is why spruce lighting is priced by the tree and not by the foot.
White pine and Austrian pine
Looser, more open, and often taller than the spruce next to it. The needles are long and soft, which diffuses light beautifully — a lit white pine has a hazier, more atmospheric quality than the crisp read of a spruce.
Because they're open, pines usually take vertical drops better than surface wrapping. A pine wrapped as though it were a spruce tends to look patchy where the canopy thins.
Mature white pines also lose lower branches over time, leaving bare trunk. That trunk can be wrapped like a deciduous tree, which gives you a nice two-part treatment: wrapped trunk below, drops above.
Arborvitae
The workhorse of suburban foundation planting from Tinley Park to Glenview. Narrow, dense, columnar, and usually planted in rows flanking an entry or screening a property line.
Arborvitae light beautifully and are refreshingly easy — a straightforward vertical wrap or a light net at a spacing tight enough to read as a solid column. Their real value is repetition: a row of six lit arborvitae along a walk is one of the strongest and most affordable effects in exterior holiday lighting.
The mistake is overloading them. An arborvitae is a narrow shape, and too much light turns a column into a blob.
Yew, boxwood, and juniper
Low, mounded, and part of the near read rather than the far one. These get light accents, not full treatment. A whole foundation bed lit at full intensity looks busy; a few well-chosen shrubs picked up around the entry looks considered.
What goes wrong
Retail strings on a thirty-foot tree. A big spruce swallows an astonishing quantity of light. Homeowners buy what feels like a lot, get it a third of the way up, and stop. The result reads as an unfinished tree, which looks worse than an unlit one.
Ladders. This is the serious one. Evergreen lighting at height means working around branches that block your view of the ladder's footing, on ground that's often soft or frozen. Falls from tree work are common, and they're not minor.
Uneven spacing. Spacing must tighten as the cone narrows toward the top. Keep uniform spacing all the way up and the top looks sparse relative to the base — a very visible flaw from the street.
Wrapping too tight. Cord under real tension against bark, left through a whole season with ice load on it, can damage a tree. Professional wrapping is snug, not tight, and everything comes off in January.
Ignoring the tree's health. A stressed, newly planted, or structurally compromised tree shouldn't be wrapped at all. A good installer will tell you that before taking your money, not after.
If you have a big spruce or pine you've been eyeing for a few seasons, this is the one element genuinely worth handing to somebody with the equipment. Our tree and shrub holiday lighting work is built around exactly this: the trees most homeowners can't safely reach.
How many lights does a big evergreen actually take?
More than people expect. A rough professional rule of thumb runs at roughly 100 lights per vertical foot of tree for a fully wrapped conifer — meaning a twenty-foot spruce done properly is a two-thousand-light tree, and a thirty-five-footer is well past three thousand.
That number explains almost every disappointing DIY evergreen in Illinois. It isn't that the homeowner did it wrong. It's that the scale of a mature tree is genuinely hard to estimate from the ground.
Frequently asked questions
Will wrapping lights around my evergreen hurt it?
Not when it's done correctly. Wrapping is snug rather than tight, nothing girdles a branch or the trunk, and everything is removed in January so no cord stays on through a growing season.
Can you light a tree that's forty feet tall?
Yes, with the right equipment. Above roughly fifteen feet the work needs lift or extension gear, which is exactly the point where it stops being a homeowner project. Very tall trees are usually lit with vertical drops rather than full wrapping.
Is it better to light one big tree or several small ones?
One large well-lit evergreen almost always beats several partially lit small ones. Scale reads from the street; scattered small elements don't. If you're phasing a display across seasons, start with the biggest tree in the front yard.
When should I book tree lighting in the Chicago suburbs?
October through early November, and earlier is better for large trees specifically. Evergreen work takes considerably longer than a roofline, so those dates fill first across Chicagoland.
The tree you already own
Most homeowners plan a display around the house and treat the trees as an afterthought. On a property with a mature spruce out front, that's backwards — the tree is the asset, and the roofline is the frame around it.
Request a free holiday lighting quote and tell us what's growing in your front yard. If it's a forty-year-old blue spruce, we'll tell you honestly that it should be the centerpiece.