Wanted to share some more Christmas with you! Here is another one of the Christmas cards I made that features a 2013 calendar and a photo - it was made with Stampin Up's My Digital Studio.
Have you ever been on a Christmas light tour? We love to do one or two every year! Are you curious about how the first outdoor displays of
lights started? San Diego, CA in 1904, Appleton, WI in 1909 and New York City, NY in
1912 were the first recordings of Christmas lights being used outdoors. The
Library of Congress credits the town of McAdenville, NC as inventing the
tradition of decorating outdoors with Christmas lights in 1956. The Men’s Club
conceived the idea of decorating several evergreen trees around the McAdenville
Community Center.
The Rockefeller Center Christmas
Tree in New York City, NY had lights since 1931 but did not have real
electrical ones until 1956. Furthermore, Philadelphia, PA had their Christmas
Light Show and Disney’s Christmas Tree also began in 1956. General Electric
sponsored community lighting competitions in the 1920’s but it wasn’t until the
1950’s that outdoor lighting actually became a familiar activity with the
general populace.
Here are a few more views of this cool tri-fold Chrismas card and more about the Christmas light shows. Since the 1950s the stringing of lights
around windows, along mantles and banisters, and running strings along
the outside frames of homes and businesses became fashionable. In recent times,
skyscrapers and larger buildings began hanging strings of lights to form shapes
or common themes and were lit in a ceremony of Grand Illuminations.
In 2004, a viral video hit the
internet of Carson Williams home in Mason, OH. Williams lit his home and
surrounding lawn with over 16,000 lights. He synchronized the lights to turn on
and off with a computer and a controller from Light-O-Rama, using 88 channels.
The music he used for this performance was the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s piece
entitled “Wizards in Winter.” For each minute of music, it took an hour to
program this synchronization of lights turning on and off. With the agreement
of his neighbors, the light show ran from 6pm to 10pm. People driving by heard
the music from an FM broadcast in their cars to keep the noise level down.
Wow!!!
Once the video went viral, it became
so popular that his light show was highlighted in a Miller Lite Beer commercial
the following December 2005. It was also featured on NBC’s Today Show, Inside
Edition and the CBS Evening News. The attraction became so popular that traffic
congestion became a problem in his neighborhood. On December 6, 2005 he
indefinitely shut down the show when emergency vehicles responding to a traffic
accident, had a difficult time getting through.
In 2006 he created a business
creating custom light shows, Consarlights.com. He has since created commercial
light shows for shopping plazas, parks, museums and zoos. His average show
consists of over 250,000 lights and uses 150 amperes of electricity!!!
This phenomenon has caught on so
much that there are now subdivisions creating light shows utilizing several
neighbors homes, all synchronized with lights coming off and on and set to
several Christmas songs. Grab a cuppa, sit back, relax and
enjoy a these two Youtube holiday light shows …The second one has a military flair tribute.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=dfz1pyq3EhE&feature=endscreen and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuEjD_dkyqU –
Hope you are enjoying Christmas Eve with family, relative, friends, etc.!!
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