Xmas Light Show Information

Hopefully you have had a chance to see the show in person, and I hope you have enjoyed it. This website is new so bear with me as I add content. On this page I will try to provide some info and history about the show.

To see some video and pictures go here.

I have always loved Christmas Lights and decorations, ever since I was a kid, my parents would bring me to Saganash where they used to go all out in decorating, I have not been there in 20 years and i hear that there is nothing setup anymore.

We bought our first house here at 468 Gregg in 2002, and I immediately went out and bought about $1,500 of white lights and deer. The only reason I bought so many the first year was my neighbor across the street, King of the blowmolds, although he does not have all of them out this year. He has got to have over 100 blowmolds.

All of the white lights were great, but it was a little boring.

I started my quest on the internet to find ways to liven up the lights a little bit. I was fortunate enough to find a website called Planet Christmas (Link to the site on the right). This is where I met 100's of people that were as insane as me, and discovered the Animated Lighting light controllers (Link on the right). No more boring display!!!

Now it is my 2nd year with the controllers, and the show is coming along.

Like I said, I bought some computer controlled light controllers from Animated Lighting, hooked everything up and started programming. Just to give you an idea, it takes about 20-30 hours to program a song. What you have to do is listen to a song about 200 times and learn every instrument and beat, then, start the program and click to the beat where you want lights to come on, that is the easy part, next you have to then determine if the lights should fade, flicker, pop on and off or ramp up. It is not difficult, just very time consuming.

I am sure you have noticed, there are still sequences that need to be filled in and adjusted, I can only do this in between times when no one is watching the show. It is possible to program and use the visualizer, but I have to see the actual lights as I program, so, slowly everything will get done, and yes, there are changes every day to the show.

I currently use about 48 channels this year and approx 3,000 lights. I have over 1,000 channels and about 150,000 more lights in the garage, I just have not had the time to get everything ready. I need to upgrade my 100 Amp electrical service to 200 Amps.

I use a low powered FM transmitter to broadcast the music to your car. It is connected to the sound card in my computer which plays the mp3's. This is kind of a burden, as during the day, every noise that my computer makes is broadcast out, such as new mail notification and you can even hear my voice mails as I play them back on the computer. Good thing I don't watch adult videos on my computer.