Chuck Smith
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2009
Christmas village tips
Here are a few tips that will make your next Christmas village scene a step above the rest. Polystyrene. Buy a few sheets of polystyrene from a hardware store. It is used as home insulation and comes in 4×8 sheets. This one item serves dozens of purposes in the scene. Small pieces can be placed under buildings to add height and to provide tunnel space for cords. It can be stacked and carved into a mountain, glacier, hill or cliff. Nothing is worse than a flat town. Carve a 1 x 5 foot length into a mountain range and place…
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2009
Indoor decorating
It’s getting really close to setup time. I’ve been working on my indoor display since the middle of September. The trees are up and in place, but not completely decorated yet. I’ll be totally done inside the house the day before Halloween. I’m certainly keeping my fingers crossed. The next project is to set up my Christmas village. I move it around and change things up every year because that’s what makes it fun. I know you’ve checked out on PlanetChristmas Richard Holdman’s picture of his father’s Christmas village around the tree and Chris Berglund’s new layout he built for…
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2009
Recording your own music
It started with Ryan Lissner of Ryan’s Christmas Lights (www.RyansChristmasLights.com) in Salisbury East, Adelaide, South Australia looking for some fresh music for his down-under Christmas display. Off-the-shelf music wasn’t an option but Suite Christmas by Carrie Lyn was a possibility. PlanetChristmas magazine asked Carrie for some DIY advice on recording a Christmas album. Suite Christmas. Rush! That seemed to be the theme of the recording project that lay before me. This was an opportunity to share with the world the talents of the new lineup for Carrie Lyn Infusion, in addition to styling of Carrie Lyn “that violinist” as Ryan…
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2009
Sequencing for a living
It’s finally November. For many lighting enthusiasts we’ve been planning our over-the-top displays for months and are now ready to begin putting up the lights. I know quite a few of the larger displays have already started the outside work. This is the time of year when many newcomers join the decorating community and are dazzled by the elaborate displays. Many do not realize the amount of planning, time and effort that goes into these works of art. There’s another component of our displays some would rather not discuss and that’s the cost. Like many hobbies today, this can get…
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2009
LEDs vs, incandescents
This was supposed to be easy. Determine once and for all if it’s time for all of us to switch to LED (Light Emitting Diode) Christmas lights. Almost everyone has an opinion and are more than willing to share unless it’s going to be mentioned in a magazine article, then they clam up tight. Most are quite comfortable with the tried-and-true incandescent lights and have heard enough war stories about LEDs to not make the jump. Enough! My job is to get to the bottom of the LED versus Incandescent Christmas light story and tell you what to do. Ready?…
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2009
So many LED based Christmas lights
I’m not worried. Well, maybe a little. It’s been the oddest thing. Until this year we’ve been quite self-sufficient at the North Pole. When we needed raw material to build another line of toys we just went to the shelf and there was everything we could possibly need. I’ll admit I was on vacation in January but way too many elves stuck here in the workshop told me about all the corporate jets flying in for behind-closed-doors meetings with Santa. I just assumed the big man in red was working on some sort of grand surprise party for all us…
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2009
The Grinch hates flying
The Grinch made it to re-PLUS in Louisville on August 1. It wasn’t the first time I’ve gone to one of these but it was the first time I was going to one that was being held in a city where there was something for the rest of the family to do while I was hanging out with a bunch of demented decorators. When I mentioned the possibility of attending to my wife in January she immediately replied “Sure! That sounds like it will be fun.” The kids, however, had a few questions they wanted answered before committing to the…
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2009
Indoor decorating
Let’s pick up from last month. You’ve got your theme and have decided where and what to do with your tree. What’s next? Gather your Christmas goodies, be it Santa, snowman, angels, country, modern or whatever and start decorating. You don’t have to have tons of everything to make your home look great during the holidays. Do your tree, hang some pine bough around the doors, add lights, some bows, floral picks, ornaments, whatever suits you. It’s your indoor display so make sure you do something you like. Remember the rule of three. Always decorate with odd numbers of items,…
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2009
Another Over The Top display!
The judges agonized over all the entries for the PlanetChristmas Inflatables Category of the 2008 Worldwide decorating contest and unanimously agreed the Liquori house in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York was the hands down winner for not only inflatables but also blowmolds. Let’s just say this one is definitely over the top! Their commitment to the community was inspiring, but it’s obvious what they really need is a bigger yard. Michael and Rosina Liquori have 25,000 lights, 500 blowmolds, giant toy soldiers, nutcrackers and 40 inflatables. Candy canes and snowflakes are all over the display as well as the…
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2009
Living Christmas Tree
Once upon a time, there was a little girl whose father worked on a farm with hardly a tree in sight and about twelve miles from the middle of nowhere. Her family was poor and lived in the farmer’s basement. One Christmas they could not afford a tree, so the father made a board to hold one string of Christmas lights and displayed it on the farmer’s mantle. The little girl and her brother were allowed to go upstairs to the farmer’s living room to sit on the couch and look at the lights as long as they were very,…
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