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  This site is here to showcase the one thing I love doing more than anything else in the whole year - my Christmas Lights displays. As a youngster I always loved to see Christmas lights, and marvelled at the homes and buildings I saw in American movies based at Christmas time, that were covered head to toe in lights, hoping one day I could do the same here. I live in South Wales, UK, and such large lighting displays here are still few and far between, it simply isn`t as popular as it is State-side. Since 1996 I have realised my childhood dreams, adorning my family home with lights. Each year it changes, never exactly the same twice in a row, and all the results of the time and effort I put into decorating each year are featured here. 
Christmas 2007 is over and this year`s lights display has now been turned off and taken down. Although I had originally thought I`d not put up a very large display again, 2007`s display was pretty big with over 5300 all-LED lights, three times more than the previous year. The blue LED icicles returned around the roofline, and while it was still not possible to attach anything to the walls and around the windows, the lights used on the house in past years found a new home among the bushes in the front, several more of which had now grown large enough to be illuminated. I would have put up more lights too, but the extremely wet and stormy weather we had during the previous season seemed to have caused a fair bit of damage. On testing, most of the mini-trees and a good many sockets in the C7 sets that would have gone around the roofline were not working, and it would have taken too long to repair or replace them. I was able to salvage and repair a few light sets from some of the mini-trees, but if those are to return in the future, they`ll need a fair bit of work. The weather during the 2007 season was a mixture of wind & rain, and calmer cold frosty periods. Despite the storms, everything held up well, asides those salvaged mini-tree sets which continued to suffer in the damp. Also, poor Dennis the deer will need some major surgery on his lights if he is to return next year, as rather a lot of them have corroded and gone out.
A new and improved RGB colour changing floodlight system was in use too, comprising of two large and four small floodlight housings, modified with hand-made boards of red, green and blue LEDs. Centrally controlled by a small and inexpensive, but rather powerful controller, I had hoped it would be a big improvement over the self contained Par38 lamps used last year. Unfortunately many problems were encountered with the low cost LEDs and time ultimately did not allow any outdoor testing prior to switching on at the beginning of December. So despite having many more LEDs than last year`s PAR spots, they turned out not to be bright enough. Still, the rest of the lights more than made up for it. See the 2006++ section for some preliminary photos of 2007`s lights, with many more to follow in the future. If you`re still wondering where 2005`s pictures are, don`t worry as it wasn`t a repeat of 1997. I took more photos than ever, and we even got a little bit of snow for one evening. They are all still here, it will just take a while to go though them. Hopefully not much longer now. Site Last Updated - January 6th 2007. The season has finished and the lights have now been taken in. |
