Where Are The Best Holiday Lights In Napa Valley?

NAPA VALLEY, CA — Can the holiday lights on your home be seen from space? Does it look like the Las Vegas strip?

If you've spent days or weeks painstakingly hanging strands of lights on your house, palm trees and shrubs, or hauling multiple figurines out to your lawn — Patch wants to hear from you.

Soon, we're compiling a Patch California tour o' lights, where readers can explore the best holiday light displays in the Napa County area.

We aim to have the list up as soon as possible — so email photos and a description of your winter wonderland to Kat Schuster at kat.schuster@patch.com.

For many of us, taking in our neighbors’ outdoor holiday lighting displays and other decorative touches is as much a part of the season as exchanging gifts and singing Christmas carols.

According to mental health experts, there’s a good reason twinkling holiday lights and colorful displays make us feel good.

“It does create that neurological shift that can produce happiness,” Psychologist Deborah Serani, a senior professor at New York’s Adelphi University, told NBC’s “Today” show. “I think anything that takes us out of our normal habituation, the normal day in, day out ... signals our senses, and then our senses measure if it’s pleasing or not.”

Decorating for the holidays “will spike dopamine, a feel-good hormone,” she said. “For a lot of us, Christmas is a magical time, it’s a time of innocence. It’s a time of joy.”

That’s why Patch and T-Mobile are partnering to find the lighted homes around Napa Valley to visit.

A few details:

If you’re including a video, please upload it to YouTube and send us the link so we can embed it (make sure it's marked “public”). We also request that the homeowner submit their yard or a close relative's.

We’ll keep updating the list for Napa County throughout December.