Holiday lights? Let your fingers do the walking.

As the Koreivo family celebrates Thanksgiving today, they can enjoy the feast and their new holiday tradition: having professionals hang their Christmas lights.

With their turkey-in-Pilgrim-hat flag still adorning their Long Beach house, the Koreivos handed the chore of untangling cords and replacing dead bulbs to a company called Crocodile.

By sundown today, the palm trees will be wrapped in green and white mini-bulbs, traditional colored bulbs will line their second-story roof and dangling white icicle lights will have been added to the “Tropical Christmas Paradise” they paid for.

Number of bulbs used: 3,000.

Cost: not priceless, they said, but $400 well spent.

On their cul-de-sac, their neighbors tend to go all out, and when they moved in three years ago, they were “Scrooges,” tacking one strand around the door.

“I felt the pressure,” said a grinning Chris Koreivo, an insurance broker. “Even our Jewish neighbors had lights.”

So when Crocodile owner Joshua Barclay, whose Cypress company washes commercial and residential windows year-round, dropped a porch flier stating “Christmas light installation ... no job too big or too small,” Jill Koreivo called.

Barclay said it usually is the wives who call. They want to avert such calamities as the husband falling off a ladder or electrocuting himself with aluminum rain gutters and power cords. Or they want to avoid the muttered swear words about repeat hardware store trips and nagging to get out the dusty coils of lights, Barclay said.

But his customers are a wide cross-section that includes men who just don’t want to bother (see above), single women, workaholics and older people.

For customers such as the Koreivos, there was another creeping dread: In barely a month they would be climbing back up to painstakingly undo the hours of effort.

Just the thought of that was buzz kill enough, Chris Koreivo said, but “if you leave them up until February ... you become one of those neighbors.”

So last year, the Koreivos paid Barclay $1,150 to buy all new lights and timers as well as containers to store them in. About $700 of that was for labor. Their son Nick, 12, and daughter Emily, 16, were thrilled.

“It was great. Having it all done early, so festive,” added Jill Koreivo, a software sales rep whose teenager joked of a childhood tainted by a lack of holiday decor.

“Our neighbors hired a different company to put up their lights, and they were admiring ours. It’s not a competition,” insisted an almost straight-faced Chris Koreivo, “although I do feel our light guy is better than theirs.”

Professional lighting is not year-round work, so those who do it are otherwise employed as electricians, handymen or window washers such as Barclay. His company is licensed and insured, but many -- one- or two-man teams with a ladder who drive through neighborhoods and offer to string lights cheaply -- aren’t.

It is impossible to count those who do such work, said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

But Barclay, 34, said his clientele has increased so much in the last three years -- mostly through word of mouth and porch fliers -- that he has hired Jonathan Pilkington to help him from November to after New Year’s Day.

Kyser, whose do-it-yourself father made sure the family’s house was the most bedecked one on their street, said the region’s low unemployment -- October saw the lowest rate since his group began tracking it in 1983 -- made a professional lighting niche feasible.

“We’re in an area where there is a tradition of having outdoor lights and we’re in a time of time constraints, and it makes great sense, especially if someone has the experience of going up a ladder,” he said.

“If you look at the trend in homes with what we call McMansions, phew!” he added. “Who has a ladder that goes up that high? This is a service that fills a need.”

And it is not only the rich and big-housed who pay someone else to handle the tedious task.

“My customers are usually overworked and overwhelmed at this time of year,” Barclay said, noting that most of his holiday lighting is for Christmas, though he’s increasingly been hired to string lights for “winter” and for Halloween.

Many of his customers live in tract homes and figure their limited time and lack of experience make it worth the money to have someone else decorate -- as with housekeeping, yard work and other services.

Barclay has a $100 minimum, and the final price is based on the number of light strands and where they will go.

“Hiring us is like a Christmas gift to themselves. Now they can relax and enjoy the lights.”

Take Amy and Scott Royale, who live in East Long Beach’s Belmont Park.

She says she wanted the tradition of her husband and two young children putting up lights together. Yet she did not want him climbing ladders to reach the high roof of their newly remodeled home.

So her husband and the children hung the low-level lights, and she hired her longtime window washer, Barclay, to handle the higher reaches. “ “This way we can keep our tradition,” she said. “And,” she added, laughing, “we don’t get divorced.”

Barclay has dozens of jobs in Huntington Harbor and Long Beach, where there are December boat parades over several nights and waterfront homes blaze with lights, fountains and even animatronic displays.

“I’ve done trains, rooftop sleighs, reindeer, moving snowmen -- you name it,” Pilkington said.

This weekend is when the lighting season really launches, and it doesn’t wane until days before Christmas. Barclay’s company will do more than 50 houses this season.

His cellphone didn’t stop ringing Sunday when he and Pilkington began the Koreivo family job, which they were to finalize this morning. It was a few days after he had canvassed numerous neighborhoods with his lime-green porch fliers advertising holiday light installation. In Belmont Shore, there are at least three companies doing the work, including one called St. Nick.

Though Barclay and Pilkington have done some Hollywood mansions with up to 16,000 lightbulbs, they said holiday excess is less common than do-it-yourself horror stories.

Last year, a man in Signal Hill approached Pilkington, then working for a different company, as he worked on someone’s house. The man showed him scars on his forearms and neck and said he had pitched his ladder too horizontally and its feet slid backward, sending him and the ladder through an 8-foot picture window.

“If you haven’t gotten comfortable with ladders at age 45,” Pilkington observed, “don’t suddenly start with the Christmas lights.”

nancy.wride@latimes.com

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Do-it-yourself tips

For those who want to hang their own holiday lights this season, here are seven tips from professional installers Joshua Barclay and Jonathan Pilkington of the company Crocodile.

* Read the instructions that come with your holiday lights.

* Do not play electrician and splice cords or plugs. Ever. This is the biggest mistake do-it-yourselfers make. Electrical tape won’t save you here.

* Know that one electrical outlet can drive no more than three or four strands of lights. This is the second most common mistake, leading to blown circuits.

* Test your lights on the ground so that you can replace burned-out bulbs before they are strung on the house.

* Think about placement of the lights before you climb that ladder.

* Don’t climb the ladder if you don’t know what you’re doing. Make sure it has rubber feet to avoid conducting electricity and pay attention to your weight distribution in relation to the angle of the ladder.

* When removing lights, make sure the power is off and don’t pull out metal fastening staples with pliers, or you risk shock.