Why Being A Maker Has Made Outdoor Holiday Lights A New Everest
Our family loves the holiday season, kicking off with Halloween and capping with Christmas.
My wife has always had a fascination with decor in general, but holiday-specific decor specifically. Once we bought our house, that extended into me getting interested in how the outside looked too. Over the years, we’ve made tombstones and a Disney skull cauldron for Halloween, but haven’t made anything ourselves for Christmas.
Christmas lights are stunning and we want them to look amazing, but how did it become this massive project for “one day”?
It Started By Accident In High School
At the time, I never would have believed it would come full-circle 20 years later, but the seed was planted when I was 16.
In 2005 (yes, I’m old), my family moved to Atlanta and I was lucky enough to quickly make friends with some Audio folks at a local church who took me under their wing and taught me. This quickly evolved to include doing lighting design for some events, concerts, and theater productions (nothing fancy, just local) with moving lights. I was amazed at how syncing the lighting to the music could change and amplify the effect of the music and the two worked together so well.
I kept it up till 2010 when I needed to focus on my college work and thought I was giving up lighting design forever.
The Classic Griswald Beginnings
Fast forward to 2017, the year after my wife and I purchased our house and we could think about outside decorations (and not just getting settled).
We had put up a couple of cheap string lights the year before just to say we did, but wanted to take it seriously. If you know me, I don’t know how to do something that interests me half way, so my big goal was to have the brightest house in the neighborhood. I took our time at Disney to see how they lit up the Christmas lights and bathe Cinderella’s castle in light.
We succeeded, and still have the brightest house in the neighborhood to this day, but something still felt like it was missing.
The Disney Stroller Project That Created A New Dream
In mid-2024, a video from the YouTube channel, Break It Yourself, came across my feed where Richard synced his stroller LED Lights to the Disney Happily Ever After fireworks show.
I was immediately hooked and vowed to do that with our stroller lights when we went in October 2024 for the Not So Spooky Halloween Parade music. I spent months tinkering, learning the lighting software, programming the entire 30 minute parade, and getting it set up on the stroller. The lights looked so cool in my garage and I was excited to try them in the park.
The night came, the parade was starting, everything all set, so I plugged in the lights…..and they failed miserably.
I made a rookie mistake of not weatherproofing the control box and it was damaged in rain. But I was hooked on the idea of scaling what I learned to our entire house.
