A ladder, a car trunk and a lot of knocked-on doors

Midwest Holiday Lighting started the way a lot of good Central Illinois businesses do: with somebody who needed to work hard and figured out how to do it well. Tom Johnson was serving in the Illinois Army National Guard and studying at the University of Illinois when he began knocking on doors in Champaign with a collapsible ladder in the trunk of his car, offering to hang Christmas lights the right way.

The right way turned out to be the whole business. Custom-cut light lines instead of box-store strands. Clips instead of staples. A design for each home instead of the same thing on every house. Coming back to fix a bulb instead of disappearing until takedown. Storing the lights so the customer never had to. Word spread from one street to the next, and hundreds of homes later, the standard is the same: every install should look like the best house on the street.

Today we light homes and businesses within 60 miles of Champaign, from Bloomington-Normal to Decatur, Danville and Mattoon-Charleston, and we're a licensed installer of Orca Smart Lighting permanent lighting, the best permanent lights in the area, backed by our own 5-year warranty. We're veteran owned, fully insured, and still run by the guy with the ladder.