Some people would say this has become an obsession. I don’t argue with that very much, particularly from September through January. This obsession has become pretty entertaining and it does give me an outlet for an overwhelming pent-up need to make stuff.
Everyone puts lights out during the holidays. They brighten our spirits, they give us something fun to look at when we are driving home from yet another boring holiday dinner party and in some cases they make us wonder, “what the???” The lights at Mammoth Christmas hopefully bring every one of these thoughts and add a real sense of WOW!
Christmas Lights have always been a recurring theme in my existence. Little twinkle bulbs have been showing up in everything from school projects to Halloween costumes as long as I can remember. My family has learned to keep me away from the big discount stores’ after Christmas clearance sales lest they be displaced in the car by boxes of 90% off light strings. I once filled a Subaru wagon with lights so full that I could barely fit in the driver’s seat. A target sold me 2 pallets of leftovers one year for basically $0.03 on the retail dollar just to get them out of their warehouse. But it really isn’t about the lights.
What can you do with lights? In the early 1990’s my wife’s brother, her dad and I entered a “holiday boat parade” called Lights on the Lake. We didn’t do this from any real desire to freeze our keesters off in the frigid December lake air but rather to prove a point. You see, the local commercial decorating guru was having his crews come out to decorate and hang lights on his oversized houseboat each year. Since the Lights on the Lake had a competitive element to it and he was always taking home the winning flag, we felt that his advantage was unfair and so we set out to prove a point.
With a 25’ pontoon boat, a Hobie Cat, a Honda generator, some plastic pipe, about 5000 lights, some fiery ingenuity and lots of duct tape we created an ethereal waterborne Polar Express of sorts. Our creation was less boat and more sculpture and knocked the socks off everyone who saw it. Needless to say, said decorating guru was unseated and the “Commodore of Lights” flag still flies proudly in my garage.
We followed up a year or so later with a biplane- the left-over rotating prop from that airplane still spins annually in the Mammoth Christmas display.
Lights at home were always nice, if a bit unusual. One year, rather than lighting the bushes like everyone else does, we placed a few thousand white lights on the ground cover in all the natural areas around the house. It had a snowy effect and then when 3” of mother-nature’s finest fell, the lights-under-the-snow effect was spectacular.
After renovations of our house were completed, the display began to grow. An old gear-motor rig left over from a TV commercial project morphed into the rotating Santa Claus that has become a traditional memory for lots of young kids. I can be mowing the yard in spring and summer and people will stop with their kids to ask if Santa will be back at Christmas.
We get cards, letters, handwritten notes, poems, paintings by kids and the coveted Griswold Award (a family named Griswold does this as a nod to the movie Christmas Vacation) in our mailbox every year. We get ridiculed by the local morning radio dweebs. We get interviewed by the paper and TV. We get tour busses, retirement home vans and the occasional limo parked out front. But, what we don’t get is complaints. Surprisingly, our neighbors and others who have been living with the traffic jams, noise, rutted yards and occasional bit of trash still seem to love it.
Size really doesn’t matter. Lots of computerized displays around the country have WAY more lights, channels, circuits, songs and colors than Mammoth Christmas. That is cool and I enjoy reading about other displays and occasionally getting the chance to see one. This past year I met a few other guys who have the same psychological disorder that I have, that compulsion to flash, blink: repeat and to spend hours and hours coiling, untangling, plugging, and programming light displays. Great guys and this is a great hobby for anyone with a little technical savvy.
As a big proponent of “making things” that engage the brain or inspire thought and wonder, I find that computerizing a holiday light display is worthy of doing. I started out with 32 channels of Light-O-Rama hardware that I built from a kit. Not content with the low power capability of the LOR boards, in true “maker” style, I modified them heavily and boosted their power handling considerably. My 32 channel controller ran 100 amps of lights that first year- maybe 25,000 bulbs total with 10 of the channels swinging 20 amps of load each. I learned quickly about power balancing because turning everything on at once would pop the 50AMP 240V circuit breaker!