Deck the halls with high-tech holiday lights

It's the most wonderful time of the year — unless you're the one tasked to untangle and hang all the holiday lights Clark Griswold-like. (Remember that scene in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation when Clark covered his house with about 10,000 too many twinkling lights and knocked power out to the entire city?)

Too bad for Clark he didn't live in 2014. But you do, which means you and I are about to be blown away by the wireless, color-changing, smartphone-connected Christmas lights of the future. Got your sunglasses handy?

• Lumenplay

It takes a lot to impress me these days, so when Lumenplay's crazy LED light strings promise to let me change their color using my smartphone, I had my typical "ho-hum" thoughts. What, they can change between red and green? Or maybe a half-dozen hues at the most? Try 16 million different colors. Yeah, that's a number that can snap even jaded ol' me out of my holiday haze.

The Lumenplay app lets you save your favorite colors and set up wild motion effects that turn your front porch into a real light show. The Lumenplay bulbs even look like the old-school "fat" bulbs that you remember from when you were a kid, but these are way, way smarter.

• Aura

Christmas lights mean cords — that's just the way it is. Aura is trying to change that with a wireless lighting system that seems like something out of your dreams. The big, beautiful Aura bulbs hang from your trees like ornaments, but they're much more high-tech than the silver balls you're used to hooking from the branches.

The secret is the Aura Power Ring, which you slide underneath the tree and plug into a wall or extension cord. Once the ring is switched on, the Aura bulbs above it light up with some sort of crazy Christmas voodoo. You can activate the Power Ring with your smartphone of course, and the LED bulbs will last for up to 20 years, so don't expect to be replacing them any time soon.

• Blisslights

This might be the easiest way to win the lighting competition in your neighborhood. Instead of hanging crazy strings of lights all over your house, just stick one of these Blisslight holographic hubs in your lawn, point it at your house, and press the power button. Ta-da! It's a professional-quality lighting display with almost none of the work.

These awesome Blisslights projectors make it look as if your house and trees were covered in tiny, super-bright bulbs, but the reality is so much simpler. The tiny projector stays hidden in your yard and shoots the gorgeous light show out with the push of a button. Then you can crank up the brightness knob from "subtle" to "surface of the sun" and really give your neighbors something to see, and then laugh when they're dismantling their own lighting setup while you simply pick your projector off the lawn and put it on the shelf.

• iTwinkle by GE

I can't think of anything closer to a Christmas Starter Kit than a box with a huge tree already covered in awesome lights. That's exactly what GE conjured up with the iTwinkle tree. It's absolutely packed with super sparkly mini lights — 500 in all — and 75 smart LEDs that you can control with an app on your smartphone.

The iTwinkle app is your ultimate holiday remote control, and you can use it to make your flashy 7-foot tree twinkle in different patterns and totally change its look by changing between 2,000 different colors.

• Philips Hue LightStrips / LivingColors Bloom

Philips Hue LightStrips are the perfect mood-setting holiday accessory because you can cut them, hang them, or drape them anywhere you need a bit of twinkle, and they deliver in an instant. Light up your living room or front porch and include a LivingColors Bloom accent light on a wall or corner and I promise it'll be hard to keep a smile from taking over your face. Elegant, tasteful and just plain gorgeous.

• "But I don't need new lights"

You're thinking that these are all great, but your old-fashioned bulbs are just fine, right? Well, if you need a little assistance convincing yourself that it's time for an upgrade consider this: LED lights like the ones from GE, Lumenplay and Aura can be up to 10 times more power efficient than the tangled strings you pull out of a box in the basement every year. Imagine your Christmas light power consumption dropping by 90% just by upgrading to one of the flashy new sets above, and you'll probably find these options pretty hard to resist.

Be sure to share your best Christmas light "hacks," tips, tricks and photos in the comments section.

Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech contributor and host of USA TODAY's digital video show TECH NOW. E-mail her at techcomments@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter @JenniferJolly.