Saturday, December 4, 2010

A Christmas Light Story

About 2-3 years ago at the beginning of December I was driving home at night and decided to take a detour through neighborhoods I don't usually drive in to see if I could spot some of the early birds who already had their Christmas lights up.  I turned down a street that was a dead end, or cul de sac, that was an out of the way, private street, although there was no 'gated community' sign at that time.  I was nearly at the end of the street when I slammed on the breaks and sat for over 45 minutes mesmerized by what I saw.  The light show on this house was utterly amazing.  There was a sign in their front yard right by the street that said, 'turn your radio to such and such dial'.  I did, and music filled my car and the light show was exactly choreographed to the music.  There were many songs in the show, some loud and upbeat, and some soft and reverent.  It was absolutely spellbinding, and what was funny, was that I was the only one sitting out front of this house watching this spectacular show.  But that didn't last.  About 2 weeks later when I tried to take my grandchildren to see this, there were lines of cars parked for miles trying to get into this little road and policemen trying their best to direct traffic.  I'm probably remembering the story wrong, but I think the owner of the house is a computer software engineer and he spent some humongous amount of time setting up all these lights then choreographing it all to music.  (This was before I'd ever heard of setting Christmas lights to music.  Now It is more common and I think you can buy programs with simplified ways to do this in the stores.)  Sometimes when I see a 'Chevy Chase Griswald' house with tons to plastic Santas, and such, it looks pretty cheesy, but if you were really into lights and wanted to make a statement, this was a pretty classy way to do it!  Sidenote, the news media came, I think it was on national news and I think he won some awards, but he only had this display one year, probably because of complaints from the neighbors or police.  Here is a clip from YouTube, but it is not the best quality. 
Edit to this post:  I found the owner's website, where he talks about setting this up and has high definition videos of all the songs, and I just relived them all.  Beautiful!!!  If you love Christmas lights, click HERE and this will make your day!!!



P.S. Remember to post and link your favorite Christmas light image to the previous post so we can enjoy what you are seeing this season!