Radio Spot!
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Welcome!
If you've found your way to this page it is likely that you are either a relative, close friend, or fellow holiday lighting nerd. Whatever the case may be, there is a reasonably good chance that you are at least somewhat familiar with us and our increasing level of holiday madness. Dave and I began this website this year, 2012, with the intent to document, archive, etc.. all things related to Christmas lighting. We've learned from year to year that we are horrible note-takers, or more particularly, horrible note "savers." As we started working our our lighting display this year we constantly found ourselves asking each other "do you remember how we did [this] or [that] last year?" We'd manage to dig up near-illegible notes here and there, and while our minds would be a bit refreshed we'd be far from having an accurate account of methods used in the past. And, I should add, this is not a new thing this year. We came to realize that we were essentially reinventing the wheel each time around and realizing a little too late each time why we didn't do things a certain way in years past. Alas, the time has come to write a bit of a history of our experiences with this crazy endeavor. The hope being, that like any good history, that we will be able to learn from the past. So, while this website may be humorous, insightful, or otherwise interesting on some level, its primary purpose is to encourage us to keep all of our notes, pictures, video, et al. in one central place so that we might maintain some level of sanity in future years.
Now, having provided the above mentioned disclaimer, there may be some among you wondering WHY? And, well, there is no solid explanation or rationalization for our behavior. It all started in the fall of 2007 when we saw a video titled 'Christmas Lights Gone Wild' - It was sent around in one of those e-mail forwards that always manage to spam their way through our lives. So we watched the video.
Being the nerds that we are we were both making comments like "that's pretty cool," "I wonder how hard that would be to do," "I've always thought that would fun," and "lets figure out what it would take to make it happen." Although this display inspired us, we tried to be as original as possible in our presentation.
Dave remembers having a neighbor growing up (the Sedgwicks) that did something similar, although without audio. His family would drive past the Sedgwicks every year to see their lights. This project was also very similar to Dave's senior design project for his undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering at Utah State University. Several websites and YouTube videos later, we found ourselves at Light-O-Rama's website purchasing our first ever 16-channel controller. And thus began the madness.
We've missed a couple of years since, due to various reasons, but the spark that ignited the holiday-lovin' geeks within us has never died. Each year we try to add something new or different and perfect our musical sequences a bit more. We are far from experts in the area, and can only pretend to compete with the gurus out there. Having said that, let it henceforth be made known that while we love and appreciate you for visiting our display and supporting us in this endeavor, we don't do it for all of you - we get crazy with Christmas because its fun for us and for our kids.
And just to clarify, our electricity bill is really not that much higher than normal in December.
Enjoy your visit. And come see our display this year!
Click the links to the left to see videos, pictures, and other details from our display in years past...