Hard to believe Christmas has passed and the new year is here already!

Tonight, Jan. 4, will be the final night of the display. I will be taking everything down tomorrow and beginning plans for next year (believe it or not, it takes all year to plan for this!).

A huge thank you to everyone who has come out to the display. I truly hope you enjoyed the lights, the music, and the magic. As usual, next year will be bigger and better.

Come by tonight if you haven’t had the chance to see it all yet! The lights will be on!

Last night, as we were watching the display for a few minutes, my girlfriend noticed that one of the mini-trees was out. I told her I would check it out this morning.

So this morning, I get up and head outside to investigate. As I near the grove of mini-trees, a little brown rabbit darts out from under the broken tree and scurries away. I take a closer look at the tree and realize that the little rascal chewed through the light strings in multiple places! The picture below shows the damage and various bits of string he bit off.  I restrung the tree and put it back in the grove, so all is good now.  Crazy rabbits…

I just want to say a huge thank you to everybody that has come out to see the display so far.  I love spreading the Christmas cheer but I can’t do that without all you guys sharing in the magic by coming by to see the dancing lights.  So again, thank you so much for coming out!  I’m gonna keep the lights going until the first or second week of January, so if you haven’t had a chance to see them yet or you know somebody that would love to come, you still have plenty of time!

I found out this past week that the Daily Herald will be doing a story about holiday displays soon and my display will be the centerpiece.  I’m very excited about this!  A photographer came by yesterday to get a headshot of me and some pictures of the display for the story.

So I went home Friday to make sure everything was ok with the display and to take the pictures.  Unfortunately, the lights laid across the roof were buried in snow.  So I had to shovel the roof - literally!  I hung out the second story windows above the roof and shoveled as much snow off as I could to make the roof lights visible.

My apologies to anyone who came to see the display tonight and didn’t hear any music.  Someone in my house accidentally unplugged one of the audio cords and as a result, the radio transmitter didn’t broadcast any Christmas music!

It has been fixed though, and everything is good to go for tomorrow night!  So come on by and celebrate a Jahn Christmas with us!

Many, many hours are spent programming the display on the computer, using a simple animation to see how the lights will look on the house.  Once the programming is complete, the time comes to start turning that simple animation into reality by physically constructing the display on the house.

What looks cool on the animation doesn’t neccessarily look cool on the actual house.  I do my best to plan everything out ahead of time so there’s few differences when the animation becomes the real display. When I run the lights for the very first time after constructing the display, it’s a slight gamble to see if my vision becomes reality.

I’m happy to say that today that vision did become reality.  I turned the lights on, ran the show a few times, and it’s all that I imagined and more.

I started setting up the display today. I will be building the display little by little over the next two weeks. You can see pictures of the what I accomplished today on the pictures page.

The show will begin the evening of Thanksgiving (November 22).

Welcome to the brand new Jahn Christmas site!  I decided to redesign the site for this year and I’m happy with it.  I will be posting pictures of the display setup during the summer as well as videos if I get a chance.