During the holidays of 2017, when I was in 8th grade, I saw my first animated light show. I was overcome with an incredibly strong desire to know how it works, and how I could get involved or even make my own. The raw combination of art and engineering as well as hardware and software was enough to capture my imagination like nothing before.

When I pitched the idea to my dad he was skeptical but also intrigued like me. He bought a handful of lights for me to use a "proof of concept" to him that I knew what I was doing.

The 10 second show that I made was enough for him to trust me, and we moved forward with figuring out how to light up the whole house. I spent months online watching videos, reading forums, and learning about all the different types of hardware and software that makes a show like this possible. In July of 2018, we had a plan and made our first big purchase; about 1000 lights and a nice show controller. Over the course of the following months we tag-teamed assembling the lights and putting them up on the house.

The first year, we chose to use light strips, since they were a lower upfront cost, but we later found that the difficulty of using them (soldering, waterproofing, repairs, etc.) was not worth it, and they were later replaced for individually packaged nodes (WS2811 square pixels).

As the holidays quickly approached, I had to write some shows. I picked a few Christmas songs and made some animations for them using Vixen 3 (I would later change to xLights). When December rolled around, we were ready just in time, after about 8 months of preparation and my first semester of high school. It was a great success, however my dad and I both knew that we could do more.

Every year since that first show, we have added elements, fixed props, wiring, controllers, and have just overall been improving the show over time.

Here are some images of the setup over the years:

2018: First year - house outlines and megatree.

2019: Added snowflakes.

2020: Added candy canes and arches. Had to move to a 2-controller setup.

2021: Added icicles, new 20ft megatree, singing face (not illuminated in this image. Black box in the center of the house).

2022: (First show while I was mostly away for college) - Added big snowflake in the center of the house. Singing face moved to left (also not illuminated).

2023: Added star to megatree (revamped controller configuration/layout, new coroplast snowflakes (visually the same). Behind the scenes was much cleaner and easier to manage. By far the fewest problems we've had too during the holidays).

More info to come...