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Follow these guidelines for a safe and merry holiday season.

Kansas City, MO – December 3, 2024 -  The holiday season is here with festive lights and decorations. As families get ready to decorate, Evergy reminds customers to be safe with both indoor and outdoor holiday lights.

• Inspect electrical decorations for damage: Discard decorations that are cracked or have damaged sockets or loose or bare wires.
• Make sure holiday lights and decorations are properly rated for indoor or outdoor use: Only use indoor lights inside your home and outdoor lights outside. Not all lights are built to handle winter weather.
• Don’t connect more than three strings of lights: This could blow a fuse and start a fire.
• Look for certification labels: Decorations should have labels from independent testing laboratories such as Underwriters Laboratories (UL), Canadian Standards Association (CSA) or Intertek (ETL). If they don’t, they haven’t been tested for safety and could be a fire hazard.
• Don’t overload outlets: Overloaded outlets are a common cause of fires. Only plug one power strip or one high-wattage appliance into each outlet at a time.
• Water your real tree daily: Dry trees are a serious fire hazard.
• Use battery-operated candles: Almost half of all decoration fires are started by candles. Unattended candles are the cause of one in five home candle fires.
• Protect your electrical cords from damage: Don’t pinch them through doorways, windows or under furniture. Don’t place them under rugs or near heat sources.
• When you go to sleep, so should your decorations: Turn off, unplug and extinguish all decorations when they aren’t attended.  Half of home fire deaths occur between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.

For more safety tips this holiday season, visit evergy.com/holidaysafety.