Christmas in July may be over on Hallmark Channel, but it is August 1, which means it is time for me to get crackin’ on this year’s Christmas light show for the house. I’ll be using the same programming from last year, but will be adding in a new element this year – mini Christmas trees. I was originally going to make only 3, but have decided to make 5, and have them interspersed with our three arches (one under each arch and the others on the outside edge of the arch setup).
This is a snippet from our light show in 2018:
I may add a couple new songs this year – it’ll depend on if I can find new songs that would be fun to add to the light show.
Next year I’ll be breaking into RGB pixels. Right now our show is exclusively LED and incandescent lights. Doing pixels is a whole new ballgame – and not cheap. But the company I use for my Christmas lights had a clearance on some RGB pixels and I couldn’t resist. The difference between RGB and LED/incan lights is that with pixels I can control the color of each and every lightbulb on a string. If I want one red, one blue, one green, one purple, and so on – I can have a string of 50 bulbs be 50 different colors. I can’t do that with LED/incan lights – it’s either all red, all, blue, all green, etc. (I mean, I CAN because I know they sell multi-color lights, but I can’t CHANGE those multi-colors to be anything than what they are).
I’m debating how I’m going to use those strings in 2020. I’ll either do a set of four or six fire sticks or I’ll build a mega-tree. Both are relatively easy to make (in fact, MUCH EASIER to make than the spiral tree shown in the video above, which took a very long time but was a labor of love). No matter what I opt to build, I’ll spend most of 2020 learning the programming ropes since a 16-string mega tree is the equivalent of programming 800 channels (for reference, I currently have 72 active channels in my light show featured in the video above).
But even though that sounds daunting, I’m VERY EXCITED!
