More lights, more festive feelings as Edmonton holiday decorating ramps up

A Five Star Holiday Decor worker instals lights on a house in St. Albert, Alta., on Dec. 15, 2025. (Nahreman Issa/CTV News Edmonton)

It’s the most wonderfully busy time of the year for Steven Knight.

The professional holiday light installer says now is the “peak of the busiest time” for his business, Five Star Holiday Decor.

Demand really starts ramping up around Halloween and stays high right through until Dec. 23, he told CTV News Edmonton on Monday.

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“Every year, it gets busier and busier,” said Knight, who’s been in the light-installation business since 2010. “People want to celebrate more and more each and every year.”

He said he expects business will continue to grow as the city grows and as technology, tastes and products continue to change.

“We started this business where we would supply, install, take down, store and maintain professional quality Christmas decor for residential properties,” Knight said. “We still do that, and that’s the core of our business. Permanent lighting is one more product line that we offer where people can install it once and it stays up forever, and you can colour-change and celebrate any holiday.”

The desire to install such lighting makes sense to Suekiana El-Sharkawi, a local provisional psychologist, as the typically soft, ambient lighting used at Christmas not only reminds people of the season and things associated with it – “joyfulness, a sense of connection with family, coziness, all those positive feelings” – it can help regulate one’s circadian rhythm, she said.

“(It) helps with our sleep, our mood, and ... your overall seasonal depression and those types of feelings that can kind of come up,” she told CTV News Edmonton.

“They naturally calm our nervous system, so just seeing those lights, it just calms us inside, which probably we associate as that sense of joy and that sense of happiness and that we enjoy seeing them.”

It’s something Knight takes notice of while he and his crews do their work this time of year.

“Nothing makes me happier than going to somebody’s house or an event that we’ve decorated or a public space and seeing a look on a kid’s face when they see lights that are lit up,” he said. “You can see that feeling of Christmas or the holidays on their face.

“It’s exciting that we get to bring that to people every year.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nahreman Issa