My wife, over the years, has painted a number of those small Christmas village houses. Back in the day, you'd have to use a special light string with night light bulbs to have them light from within. That works okay, but really hard to hide the cords and it limits where you can put the houses or how you want to set up your village. Then we switched to battery operated tea lights, but didn't always turn them on because you'd then have to lift up the houses every time to turn them on and then off again, often disrupting the setup. (Or frankly, being annoyed at having forgotten to turn them off after getting into bed and having to get back up again to deal with them.)With these, all of those issues are resolved. We have some for our fireplace and requires a remote to turn them on and off, which is fine for that. I thought these also had a remote and would do the same thing. Instead, they use built-in timers, which is even better! It's a "set it and forget it" situation that we just love. You turn on the light and that automatically starts the timer for 6 hours and then they shut off on their own. We have them set to run 4pm (when it starts to get dark here in the winter) and they go off around 10pm, when we're ending the day.Because of the hassle before with the cords and other methods, we hadn't put the village out for a few years...at least not with lights. This year, it's been really nice that all of our family and visitors have commented on how nice it looks. And we love it because it's so easy!I've had them on since just after Thanksgiving and am surprised that I haven't had to replace the batteries yet, but would advise that you stock up on those ahead of time. It's not an uncommon battery type, but can be expensive if you just pick them up in a store. There are a bunch of online sources for good prices.