Some people go all out on outdoor Christmas decor. I’ve cruised many a "Candy Cane Lane" and "Christmas Tree Lane", etc., where all the neighbors spent untold hours and money creating wonderful displays of plywood cutouts, music, and lights... if not themselves as actors in the scenes! Whew... I bow to them.

Here, I’ll just mention a few more "doable" options that might be accessible to almost anyone...
  

Luminarias (as mentioned in the section above) are a very pleasant way to welcome people to your house, or to embellish your backyard...

• They can simply be brown paper bags with a candle inside. Fill the bottom inch or two of the bag with sand to weight it and in which to set a flat-bottomed candle. (Better use a short candle - a taper might topple and light the bag on fire; votive candles are most commonly employed, and you can always put them in small glass or metal containers to help weight the bag.) The bag will glow with the light of the candle... and you can also puncture the sides of the bag to make star-like holes for the light to come through.

• If you have basic metalworking skills, tall metal cones with little cut-out shapes at the top can make pretty luminarias. The points can just be rammed into the ground and votive candles simply set into the cones.

• Flat metal "walls" around a votive candle can have architectural details cut out of them for the light to show through. (Each flat surface would also show the outline of the roof at the top.) Create a Victorian village, or a farm... or a group of log cabins?

• Or if you only know how to work a can opener... Use a triangular-head can opener all around the unopened end of a food can to create a star. At the opened end, puncture several holes on the sides, near the opening. Spray paint the whole can silver or gold - and perhaps add a spiral of dazzly beads around the sides. Set this over its own votive candle. (Several in different can sizes would be lovely!)
    
• Scooped-out white pumpkins with glass-shielded red or green votive candles inside
    
• Or try making ice lanterns! - by freezing water in containers such as small buckets or large coffee cans, creating a deep hole in the centers, and setting votive candles inside the holes. (You can do the holes in various ways... suspending something heavy in the water while it freezes, scooping out the ice later with knife or heat - or, instead of using round containers, fusing four sides and a bottom together from square slabs of ice you make in cake pans.)
    
• Luminarias aren't just for lining the driveway or walk... If you have a pool or pond, float some in it! (Easy ones:  plastic bowls holding an inch or two of sand and a votive on top.)
    

People also decorate trees outdoors...

• A tree for your wildlife yard visitors (see "Christmas decorations for an outdoor tree for the critters" in Instructions)

• And why not festoon a porch tree with lights, garlands, ornaments? Friends of ours who have a tiny living room enjoy their cut Christmas tree on their covered porch.

• Many folks trim outdoor trees, their houses, giant yard ornaments, etc. for the delight of everyone in the vicinity. My favorite such endeavor was the simplest... People who, living along a wooded, dark-at-night, and well-traveled rural road, swathed a number of trees with small white lights - it looked like one had driven into fairyland!
    

And, of course, there are decorated doors - not just decorated with a wreath, but whole doors used as artists’ canvases, as it were…

• There’s the ever-popular door-wrapped-as-a-package - and though the idea is common, I love the feeling I get when I look at one: as though an entry into that house is a gift, something special and surprising.

• Perhaps you’d like to turn your package-wrapped door into a guest "book"? …Wrap it in white butcher paper, and let your guests sign in or out.

• Make your door like a window - into a nostalgic room, a country scene if you’re in the middle of a city, or to another world.

• Decorate your door to look like a patchwork quilt.

• Do you have a steel door? …You could use magnetized plastic letters to write holiday messages on it.

• One time I made my office door a list of things I wanted from Santa (yep, peace - "whirled peas", as one friend writes it - was one of ‘em; no sense in asking for small stuff!).