LauderdaleChristmas.com Christmas Lights 2009 Photos

Christmas 2009 Photos Of Our LED Christmas Lights Display

You'll also see photos on this page of:

Daytime Photos
Night time photos
Interior Photos
Setup and teardown
Disaster that occurred to our display

For 2009 our Christmas light display had over 65,000 lights, all of them LED, not a single string of incandescent Christmas lights in our entire display. New for 2009 was our giant 6 foot tall "Jeff Wheel" as I call it, which looks like a Ferris wheel, made of PVC pipe, and covered with 12 white net lights, and 12 blue LED spheres. Two of us designed and built this massive wheel of lights over a few days. This was a hit with the crowd. I also built a brand new donation box based on a fancy white aluminum mailbox I bought. I also added a new M&M's inflatable on the roof over the garage, another big hit with younger kids.

For 2009 we redesigned the platforms holding our Light-O-Rama lighting controllers so that the 16 dangling channel power cords are now securely fastened to the 2x4 strips. This allows for a much easier to manage patch bay, and the spacing allows you to use 3-way outlet bricks to plug in multiple sets of lights into each plug if you ever need to do this. All my Christmas songs and lighting sequences are stored on the SD card shown on the last photo on right below. This main lightorama controller talks to the other ones via a Cat 5 Ethernet cable.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
The year 2009 will go down as the worst year so far for my Christmas display. We had a record 10 days of rain in December, which normally receives 2-3 days of rain as the maximum. Even the Winterfest Boat Parade got rained on for the first time ever. Several gusty wind rainstorms blew over, taking down my 18 foot snowflake cascade, and destroying my Christmas arbor nutcracker soldier, who fell off his perch and lost his head.

As if that wasn't enough torture for me, my wife decided to use the cheap Christmas plastic tree stand from the grocery store instead of my foot pedal controlled high end industrial tree base like I told her to use, and guess what? The tree fell over! So I replaced that cheap plastic stand with a real Christmas tree stand.

Here's our Christmas decorations inside the house:
Yes, we do up the inside of our house with all high end Christopher Radko ornaments and cookie jars from different manufacturers. It's a real great scene to go along with those hot chocolate nights.

Our Christmas light setup ran Monday 11/23 - Sunday 11/28, Thanksgiving week:

Below right shows how we wrapped the palm fronds. I used twist ties from garbage bags spaced every foot along each palm frond. One person holds the string of Christmas lights in place, the other person quickly tie wraps the Christmas lights to the frond.

Below: One of my Santa's helpers places LED rope light snowflakes on my roof, while the mega tree awaits emergency surgery during setup after a near catastrophic collapse.

We rented a JLG 400S Telescopic Boom Lift cherry picker. This has a 45 foot reach and did quite well as we installed our Christmas slights up high. I prefer the JLG 450 AJ articulating boom that we used for Christmas 2008, as it had much more articulating control, and a smaller bucket platform to fit between our palm trees.

It's scary looking down at the Christmas lights on your house from twice the height of your house!