When it comes to lighting the exterior of your home, there are two ways to go about it.

You can do it cheap... You know; solar pathway lights that look good for a few weeks then one by one, mysteriously stop working. Perhaps accentuated by a DIY sensor light that you were sure you could set to stay on - until you wired it in and discovered unless you move around every thirty seconds, your outdoor dining experience resembles more of a nightclub with a strobe light.

Or you can do it right...

When it comes to doing lights right, Philips Hue has never let me down yet, although the Festavia Globe Outdoor String lights were the first I've tried for outside.

I knew I was dealing with a quality product right from the git-go, even when I was just taking them out of the box.

I'm talking a 21-metre long set of 30 globes, each light meticulously wrapped in paper and the entire length tied into more manageable bunches to avoid the frustration of any pre-hanging tangles.

21 metres is decent - that should cater for most outdoor areas in one way or another, although there's a 14-metre extension available if you really want to go to town. Just note, while it's called an extension, it actually connects at the beginning of the string, close to the plug end with its own T-shaped connector.

The so-called "Lightguide" bulbs are almost perfectly spherical and perhaps a little larger than I was expecting, which I consider to be a bonus. The globes aren't glass - Hue describes them as "glass-look" - again, that's a good thing because it means they're both weather and shatter-resistant, so you can leave them up permanently. Helpfully, even if you do manage to damage one of the bulbs somehow, you can replace each one individually.

My only disappointment early on was the lack of mounting hardware included in the box. At NZ$659.99 you really are shelling out a fair whack for what is essentially a string of coloured lights and while both the bulbs and cable seem very durable I thought there may have been a few sticky hooks or something to help me hang it all up.

Luckily, I happened to have a bucket of plastic gutter hooks stashed away from a previous life when I felt co-ordinated enough to run strings of fairy lights around my whole house each Christmas.

These sorts of fastenings are relatively inexpensive and I found they worked with the Hue Festavias just as well.

While lights like these are generally used to create a little atmosphere above outdoor dining areas, over spa pools or suspended from pergolas, given the time of year I decided to give the front of my house a more public display of holiday cheer.

It didn't take me long to run them along the guttering above my garage door, then around my entrance porch, the idea being anyone who arrives at the house will be bathed in a Christmassy glow of some sort.

As always, with Philips Hue, setup is streamlined and effortless with the latest version of the Hue app. Remember, Hue has been around a long time now so when it comes to a user-friendly configuration process, they definitely know what they're doing.

Like most other Hue products, the Festavia lights connect via a Bridge - not directly to your Wi-Fi. Initially this may seem like just an extra expense but it ultimately works to your benefit as the Bridge ends up being the only device taking up space on your home network instead of each Hue product you own hogging the Wi-Fi individually.

It also results in a reliable connection that never seems to drop out or fail when it comes to automations.

Hue has good compatibility with virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri, so you can easily control your lights with a simple voice command.

But here’s where Philips flexes: customisation.

Not only can the Hue Festavia globes get very bright, they can also wind down remarkably dim - and obviously can be set to any colour imaginable or a combination of both.

Hue offers a wide variety of scenes - both static or dynamic - all customisable to your preferences.

Don't like how fast or slow something changes? You can adjust it.

You can even match your lights to a photo (or an album of photos) if you're going for a particular style or theme for your next party, or if you prefer, sync them with your playlist and see the colours move in time with the music.

I was after something Santa would approve of, so I went with a preset called "Under the Tree" - although the Hue Scene Gallery has a selection of ten different themes in its Winter Holiday section alone.

I then bumped up the brightness and increased the speed of the colour changes because that's the kind of tech tweaking nerd I am.

Now, the front of my house lights up like a beacon for Rudolph to follow every night from 7:30 - 10:00. Just like the colour settings, setting up automations like that is easy too.

Is more than $650 to much to pay for a set of lights? Probably. But knowing they're exceptional quality, there are plenty of them, they're durable and easily customised with one of the best smart-home apps I've used, means a lot less stress at the most wonderful time of the year.