Chuck Smith
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2013
Green Christmas Book
People all around the world are celebrating Christmas in a more environmentally friendly way. Celebrating a Green Christmas will not only help save the environment, it will also save you money. This ebook gives you 50 ways to celebrate a more eco-friendly (and wallet friendly!) Why Celebrate a Green Christmas? While we gather with loved ones to celebrate the birth of Christ, we also need to celebrate Creation and our role as stewards of the Earth. God created us as part of nature and gave us the responsibility of caring for all of God’s Creation. Genesis chapter 1 verse 26…
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2013
Sub Text Santa
With the star-studded Black Nativity (2013) and Tyler Perry directorial A Madea Christmas (2013) slated for cinema release later this year, it is clear that movie studios are still keen to seize the potential of Christmas custom. There’s even a re-emerging rumour that a remake of Christmas in Connecticut (1945) might be on the cards; with Jennifer Garner in the starring role. But, what is the real ethos of the Christmas movie and how does it relate to the original message of Christmas? In the fourth century, the pagan festival of the Winter Solstice was claimed by Christians as the…
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2012
Animatronic Figures
It was many years ago, but I can still remember our yearly Christmas journey from Northwest Indiana to downtown Chicago. Our plan was to visit the windows at the Marshall Fields department store; it was a yearly highlight! I was excited to see what amazing things were waiting for us at the ultimate Christmas destination! Inside and out, the store was a child’s fantasy of sights and sounds. Each window was part of a scene in a contiguous story. Elaborate animated characters performed on their own individual stages. There was so much to look at, so much to take in,…
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2013
Put a mega-tree on the roof
It all started a couple of years ago when we needed to find a suitable house to help care for an aging relative. All my previous hard work building and sequencing a customized display for our old house was going down the drain. The old house had tons of shrubs and provided a natural setting for lots of lights. Not so with the new house. Not a single shrub anywhere. My creativity languished for 2011 and all I did was put a 16’ inflatable Santa on the carport roof. It was a good location where the south end of our…
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2013
RGB as simple as 1, 2, 3
There’s a technology heading for the decorative lighting world that has the potential to be a very disruptive force. Just as we try to get our heads around basic LEDs to displace incandescents, now we’re being asked to use something called RGB based lighting, meaning the lights can be told to change to any color of the rainbow. Good gosh. Can someone slow down so the rest of us normal people can catch up? LEDs are here to stay By now you probably already know the advantages of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). They only consume 10-20% of the power of…
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2012
The Rumor Mill keeps grinding it out
Santa gave us Labor Day off with one little caveat. We had to promise to return the next day ready to work around the clock until December 24. Seems the world is in a growth spurt since the population recently crossed the seven billion mark. All I know is that’s a seven with way-too-many zeroes after it. I’m one of the older elves and it doesn’t seem that long ago when Santa was using the million word instead of billion. There’s a lot more of you on the face of the planet but still only us elves at the North…
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2012
Lights Out
Mike Babick would usually be out tinkering in his garage this time of year, cleaning off the animatronic elves and animals that light up Santa’s Workshop in his annual Christmas display. But this October, he’s refinishing some antiques out back instead. And he doesn’t have any plans to work on his Christmas display. Any plans at all. “It’s really looking like there won’t be Christmas here this year,” he said. “It’s sad. It’s really sad. But that’s the way it’s looking.” Indeed, the way Babick sees it, there just isn’t a viable option for putting up the nationally known display…
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2012
Pearl
Christmas in the Beason house was always a big occasion when I was growing up. My mom, Pearl, loved the holidays. She would sing carols, decorate the house and buy way too many presents for our little home. You had to walk a path between the boxes just to sit on the couch! My mom instilled the love of Christmas in me as a young child in a really big way. After I grew up I started decorating my own home and have been doing so for 28 years. To the average person, I decorate to the extreme. This year…
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2012
Inflatables!
So you want to make more of an impression with the neighbors, as if 10,000+ lights dancing to music controlled by your computer isn’t enough. Consider adding inflatables to your display. Some of us have played with them, even made them a minor part of our yard but a few of us have embraced these as a centerpiece of what we do during the holiday season. What can you say about a 12 foot Santa? Neat! A 20 foot Frosty? Cool! Your visitors will be thrilled. Inflatables can be used to accent a display or take it over the top.…
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2012
The Christmas Pony
Emily desperately wanted the pony. It was all she wanted, really, ever since her family moved out in the country to the big house where she had her own room and could see all the way up the lane to where the pony was. The neighbors had a big farm with a bright white fence all around and a big red barn. Emily first saw the pony standing by the fence in the neighbor’s yard when they were driving up to the new house with the last load of items from their old apartment in the city. There were many…
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