Outdoor Decorating

Outdoor Christmas decorating

Rethinking decorations
So you are minding your own business, shopping in a store, any store, when you spot something that kicks your creative juices into high gear. You start visualizing the next addition to your Christmas display. You buy as many of the items as you can possibly lay your hands on and begin to incorporate it into the next display that will make you proud you ever learned how to plug in a string of lights. Your idea is a success and you have gained the adoration of Christmas light display admirers for the next 365 days. The next year you…
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Top 10 ideas
Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced decorator, it’s a lot of work to get geared up to start the display setup process. The purpose of this article is to help make that process go a little bit smoother and improve your processes just a little bit. I have learned from the best and brightest at the PlanetChristmas forums and have used that knowledge base to come up with lots of great ideas that help us design, build, setup and tear down our display the most efficiently way possible. At our Belardo Lights display in San Diego, we like to…
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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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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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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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A ‘Lure’ of Lights
Two years ago, downtown Hayward, Wisconsin was anything but exciting during the holiday season. Main Street was lifeless and the merchants were complaining because no one was shopping. You could find a few Christmas decorations but people didn’t seem to care. There just wasn’t much Christmas spirit in Hayward. Local merchants Jan Beatty and Barb Hand sensed a problem. They were walking down Main Street and knew something needed to be done to liven up their community. Their challenge was they had absolutely no idea what to do or where to turn. Then it happened. Someone emailed Barb a video…
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Waterproofing those connectors
Water, water, everywhere, but I can’t seem to keep it outta here! Here, being my light show, the water loves the electrical connections like I love Christmas displays, the difference being I like them turned on and bright and the water likes them shorted out and dark! How to stop the evil water infiltration? Giant sponges? No, too hard to wring out each day. Umbrellas? Nope, blocks the lights. Hmmmmmmm, who will stop the rain, do’h, that’s a line from a song! OK, so here are the standard ways to protect the lights: electrical tape and duct tape. They work,…
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Christmas car
Tim Smith takes lighting his car to an entire new level. We asked him why? “This is the 9th year I did it. Basically, it just makes everyone happier. When I take it downtown or in neighborhoods, you can see the atmosphere of the place just get lifted and I figure with the chaos that’s going on all over the place, if I can make someone forget about it for a few seconds and have them step out of reality and just smile then it is worth the time and effort put in. That is what makes it addicting. That’s…
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Squeezing more from your light controllers
Do you wish your light controllers had more channels? Me too. If you have recently joined the ranks of the “Computerized Holiday Lighting Crowd” you’ve probably figured out it takes a bit of an investment to get a decent display up and running. Controllers, light strings, extension cords, FM transmitters – it adds up quick. Most reasonable people operate within some type of budget when planning a light show, so where do you draw the line (from an investment standpoint) from year to year? Last year I learned the hard way why it makes sense to have a spare controller/board…
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Show testing from an iPad
So, you want to test your lights, and the more you have the more you need to test as you get ready for launch night. Like most however, I started off my first year of doing animated lights using the more primitive 2FSS run method. Better known as the two feet, two sneakers and stairs method, aka: running upstairs to turn on display, then back down to see if it works, then back up if it did not, or if it started some of them, but not others. Wow, plain exhausting, and the more lights, stairs, yard you have, the…
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