Diamond Crescent Musical Christmas Lights

If you'd like to see our lights again but you're not that into Christmas songs as this point, why don't you come and say "Hello" to a fresh batch of songs that will be running until New Year's Eve? Remember, if you haven't donated yet, we're still collecting for the Chilliwack Firefighters Charitable Society.

Merry Christmas! Tonight is your last chance of the season to watch our Christmas songs. Since Christmas Day typically doesn't have too much viewer traffic on our street, we to run our full set of Christmas songs until 10 PM. P.S. The toy in the video is something we got on clearance a few years ago and held onto it until the kids were older. But Dad is the one who's into it the most!

We were out to empty the donation box tonight and saw something near the curb across the street. It looks like somebody dropped their teddy! Message us if it's yours... or your child's.

This doesn't have much to do with our own show, other than it being colouful, musical, fun, strangely addictive, and [optionally] Christmas-related. Hat tip to Kaleb!

So, we found this mysterious obelisk on our front lawn this morning... Edit: While happening to be talking to various people about it, they think that the thing is actually in our yard. It's not there physically, but symbolically. It's merely a Photoshop, er, Windows Paint job.

While we don't turn the music on starting November 1st, we do tend to start putting stuff on the roof earlier in the month before the weather gets too cold...

Here's our video of "A Hallelujah Christmas", slightly updated for 2020.

...and in with the new!

We're close to wrapping up with our hardware additions for the season. Here's a pic of our older daughter sliding some heat shrink tubing in place after also helping with the wire strippers and soldering. And it was done with curiosity, willingness, and enthusiasm! #finemotorskillsgobeyondcolouringbooks

This is certainly the busiest year we've ever had! Yesterday we had cars lining up around the corner and halfway down the block. In order to keep traffic moving, we're going to have some nights with a shortened program, including tonight (we set it to Friday's schedule for the time being). More info at: http://www.diamondcrescent.com/songs--schedule.html. #VictimOfOurOwnSuccess

We peeked outside earlier and saw the strobes flashing but no cars. Thinking that it was just a mid-week lull during wet weather, we thought nothing of it. We received an email indicating that the lights weren't working. We went out to investigate. The strobes were still stuck in a flashing state. It turned out to be a tripped GFI for our main controller which I didn't think would ever trip for, but it did. All is working again. Sorry for the inconvenience to those who came for joy but left disappointed.

Out with the old...

Towards the trailing end of last Christmas season, our eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed that some colours weren't exactly right in our mega tree's star. While the star's open to do repairs, this is the time to do some minor upgrades too...

There is a fairly new Facebook group called CADREB Christmas Light Group showing various photos of houses decorated for Christmas in Chilliwack this year. You can also visit http://cadreb.com/news-statistics/2020-christmas-light-tour for a full listing of addresses, maps, etc. There's LOTS to see this year! If you plan to stop by our place to watch the show, Mondays through Thursdays tend to be less busy. Viewer traffic on our street gradually builds up as the evening goes on and then trails off towards the end of the night, so aiming to come before 5:30 or after 9 PM will likely make it easier for you to find a good parking spot. Coming earlier in the month helps, too.

Remember the Island of Misfit Toys in the 1964 TV special "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer"? It's where unloved or unwanted toys live. Since our modern mega tree has replaced our primitive 5-colour light poles few years ago, and this year's newfangled full-colour arches have replaced our oldfangled white arches from a bygone era, they're now getting a bit of love from the public walking down Luckakuck Creek Trail that runs along the other side of the creek behind our house. An... assortment of working and non-working lights donated from various members of the community are also scattered on the bushes and keeping them company since we've been able to get them all glowing once again. We call our little static light display the Island of Misfit Lights! Well, it's not an island per se, but it along the water. P.S. We've been wanting to post a pic of these lights for a week or so now, but it looks like we had a critter chew through one extension cord in so many places that wasn't worth fixing. Once we replaced the wire with something worth maybe sacrificing, it was chewed through a few days later! This time, after our repair, we hung as many wires as we could above the ground. Hopefully it will last?

Also sprach Zara? The song "Also sprach Zarathustra", also known as "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" or "Thus Spake Zarathustra" was made famous in the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". We added it to our song loop this year in a nod to the achievement of our goal to have the rest of our one-colour LED light strings from the Ardipithecine era evolve into individually-controllable pixels this year. We started all this in 2010, and the show has advanced a lot since then. The most noticeable change we made to the show this year are our full-colour arches. Aside from that, we replaced the lights in the star over our living room window with individually controllable pixels, too. Eagle-eyed Homo sapiens with photographic memories from last year may have noticed the lights added around our previously dim foyer window as well.

A few loud stereos earlier this evening necessitated us to stop the show to play our announcements reminding people to keep it a silent night for the neighbourhood. Although we thought that the program loop was set to continue normally afterwards, it didn't, so the show ended earlier than scheduled. Once we noticed a half hour later that the lights weren't moving, we turned the show back on again. To help us avoid these types of program glitches, please remember to keep your stereos down, especially if your windows are open. We also don't want to drive our neighbours crazy with a month yet to go.

This upcoming Friday may be commonly known as Black Friday, but we're calling it Bright Friday! Why? Our current COVID pandemic has really cut down on the places we can go for fun outings, so we've decided to open this Friday, November 27 rather than usual 1st of December to give perhaps stir-crazy Chilliwack residents a change of scenery. What a convenient way for your household's bubble to get some entertainment while staying inside your vehicle's metal and glass bubble! Our show is better than ever this year, except for one thing: no candy canes. Sorry, but we're trying to keep things as safe as possible for you. We're still taking donations in our cash box, or you can donate online and contact-free to the Chilliwack Firefighters Charitable Society. Visit www.diamondcrescent.com for more info.

You know you're getting good at setting up the light display when you eyeball the location of and plunk down our 120-pound (55 kg) mega tree base in pretty well the exact spot it's supposed to be in!

Since plastic is more flexible at warmer temperatures, we've finally had an opportunity to work on the shape of our new arches coming this December...

Here we are in May 2020, spreading some Christmas cheer... or at least a few grins.

That was quite the storm last night! I guess it's nature's way of telling us to finish taking down the lights.

Between family commitments and rainy weather since the beginning of January, we didn't have much of a chance to get our display out of the yard before this cold snap hit. That doesn't mean that we're not thinking about our December 2020 vision! (Sorry about the obviously unoriginal and overused cliché. )

This is the last scheduled night for our light show in 2019! And a heartfelt thank you to all who came out to watch the show this past month and put in a donation to the Chilliwack Firefighters Charitable Society! We raised about $800 this year! Thank you Chilliwack! ... Dorky fact: The red, green, and blue hearts represent the three basic colours that our lights mix to produce every colour you see in our show. #sharechilliwack

A few years back, when one of our family members was helping film an independent movie, it became apparent that while movie props may look sort of half-baked if you look at them closely, they look great on the big screen. We borrowed this same trick from Hollywood's playbook for our show. Our new strip lighting mounted behind the gutters looks great lighting up the house, but from the street, you'd be able to see its distracting reflection in the window above our front door. Soooo... what we did was use a piece of non-reflective black coroplast to replicate the window's shape and decorative pattern. When our foyer lights are off, you'd never guess that it's there...

Sunshine? Check. (At least at the moment) Lollipops? Check. (The candy canes above our donation box have been swapped out) Rainbows? Not likely until after 5 PM.... What does this all mean? We've switched out our Christmas songs for something different and the new ones start tonight! Visit www.diamondcrescent.com for more info.

We started running low on candy canes a few days ago but when we visited our usual "go to" retailer to buy more, they were sold out. Well, that means we're transitioning to lollipops a day sooner than planned! Hasn't everybody had their fill of candy canes and other Christmas food anyway?

Merry Christmas morning, everyone! We bring you this Public Service Announcement for residents of Chilliwack: After opening your presents and stuffing your wrapping paper into your curbside collection recycling bin, please remember that plastic bags, plastic wrap, and styrofoam should stay out of the bins because of all the problems that it causes downstream at the recycling sorting facility. With best of intentions from thousands of people, what happens is that plastic g...ets tangled in the sorting machinery and it causes a lot of avoidable downtime. And you know when you break a piece of styrofoam packaging in your home and it makes all those annoying little pieces that blow everywhere and are a nuisance to clean up? Well, the recycling sorting facility finds them just as annoying because they get into everything and contaminate the materials intended to be made into new products. What to do? Either bottle depot in Chilliwack will take plastic bags and styrofoam. Incidentally, while you're taking your Santa Sack-sized bag-o-bags to the depot, if you've signed up for the Return-It Express program at www.return-it.ca/express, you can also take your unsorted Santa Sack-sized bags of empty drink containers and get money for them without wasting your time sorting or standing in line. And there are no fees for the service either!

Merry Christmas Eve, everyone! Hope you have a safe and happy holiday season!

Similar to what we bring to Chilliwack, there are thousands of others around the world who are in the same hobby as us and do animated light displays as well. This year, we took part in a project called xLights Around the World, where over 600 other people shared the same song and light sequencing, and submitted their videos for the world to see. The displays vary greatly: some are big, some are small, some budgets are huge, and some are modest. We're somewhere in the middle ...of the pack. Some peoples' displays take over all the available storage space in their homes and necessitate buying extra storage sheds. We can happily saythanks to some strategic display planningif we put our lighting equipment in one place in the off-season, it can be stacked in about 40 square feet of space... that feels pretty manageableto us at least. Please take a look at the video to witness the fruits of our labour of love... and maybe a bit of craziness mixed in. Our 5 seconds of fame starts at 1:44. Edit: It looks like we have 10 seconds of fame. We submitted an update with the intention of only the second updated video being used, but it looks like we're also featured at 3:07.

This house on the Light Tour is worth a stop...

The show must go on... even with our heavy rain! And our extra GFI units ensure that. Warning! Boring and wordy semi-technical background information about how our show works is below: We peeked outside earlier and noticed that our donation lighting was off while the show seemed to be running fine otherwise. You see, our show equipment is all plugged into GFI-protected wall outlets to minimize shock hazards in the name of safety, but since the strobe lights scattered... around our lawn are extra-prone to tripping them (and potentially shutting down the entire show as a result), we have additional GFI units at the end of the extension cords powering our separate strobe and donation lighting controllers. We reset the extra GFI, and the strobes and donation lights were back in business! So, even if one or both extra GFIs trip, the worst that would happen is that our donation lighting shuts off, and our show would have a little less ground-level sparkle and shine. P.S. This was the first time a redundant GFI tripped since we added them 2016. A pretty good track record...

We got our hands on a preview of the Chilliwack Christmas Light Tour that's going to be on the cover of the Real Estate Review included with tomorrow's newspaper. Our web site is shown as well in hopes that people take a quick look and see its suggestion to ensure that our neighbours enjoy a silent night. If you plan to venture out tonight to see our show, there's heavy rain in the forecast, but it may be better than dealing with heavy "parking" traffic in front of our place as we head into the weekend and get closer to Christmas.

We didn't upload the updated 2019 version of our Hallelujah Christmas song to Facebook earlier this season. We thought this would be a good time as any to celebrate and say "Hallelujah!"

The Christmas Lighting Tour listing is usually out a few weekends before Christmas but this year it's been delayed and will hitting the paper this upcoming Friday, which is also the last weekend before Christmas! Since weekends are already busier than most days, we expect a triple-whammy of crowds coming up, so if you'd like to come see the show, going before the weekend may be good idea. Traffic also tends to pick up a bit before 6 PM and quiets down after 8:30. We tried to watch our newly added song, Little Drummer Boy, around 6:15 this past Sunday after coming back from some errands but couldn't because there were already seven other vehicles watching. #ohwell

We were late sharing this event on our Facebook page this year, but to make up for it, this is the first time we came to this event and the train wasn't at least 45 minutes late!

The Christmas Lighting Tour listing hasn't hit the local paper yet, but if you want to go out beforehand, there's an online version at www.cadreb.com/news-statistics/2019-christmas-light-tour complete with maps. We're listed under 7620 Diamond Crescent, but thanks to a donation of old broken LED lights that we received and fixed up, we were able to add some extra colour behind the house along with our light poles that went into "retirement" at the end of 2015. There aren't too many lights back there, but the reflection in the stream along the walking trail doubles the count.

It's Friday the 13th, and it may be your lucky day! We use free software called xLights to sequence the lights to our songs, and a dedicated group of people in the same hobby as us are behind a project called xLights Around The World to showcase hundreds of light displays all sequenced to the same song. This year, the featured song is King & Country's Little Drummer Boy. So, if you haven't come to our house yet to see the show, you're lucky to have a bonus song added on. Or i...f you've already come to the display earlier in December to avoid the traffic on our street as the month runs on, we're sorry that you'll have to come back again to see it in-person. Wait, there's nothing wrong with that, right? P.S. Just a note of warning, though... This new song is a lot more full of, um, energy than our other songs. If viewers crank up their vehicle stereos too loud and disturb the neighbourhood, we may need to pull the song from our playlist. #xatw2019

Our family ventured out last night to check out the three houses in Lynden that also do animated lights to music. After accidentally making a few wrong turns in the dark and rain, we pleasantly realized how the residents there put in a good all-round effort of decorating for Christmas. You can find the houses with the animated lights at our website: www.diamondcrescent.com/other-musical-displays

While our Facebook page is mostly about our display, we also make it our mission to inform the public about Christmas-related happenings like other decorated houses and venues, but now we have a story about a makeshift Christmas tree theft caught by the well-known cameras that capture the seemingly never-ending hijinks at the corner of Reece and Williams in Chilliwack.

Enjoying the Lights and Music of the Rotary Christmas Parade... #sharechilliwack

Success! We received a donated bin of non-functioning light strings earlier this week and were able to fix all the LED light strings except one that was sacrificed to be a parts donor to allow the other strings to enjoy a second life. While most of the strings had one bad LED, one of the strings was far more challenging with about ten or so LEDs that were rusted out and needed swapping out. The LED Keeper (the yellow tool in the picture) made a tedious job go much faster, alt...hough it needed a MacGyver-style repair (with a piece of wire and a pushpin) partway through the light string repair process after much use over the years. We'll keep you posted on what we're going to do with the LED strings...

Our new song, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", seems to be a fan favourite. This guy with the green skin glow may be an exaggerated dramatization of when the song starts and the tree opens its eyes, then smiles, and starts singing the lyrics. #magicarpguy

This meme is worth re-sharing from a year ago... Like previous years, we're collecting money on behalf of the Chilliwack Firefighters Charitable Society. You can place your donation into the cash box out in front of our house (and treat yourself to nice show and a candy cane for your efforts), or if you're not making the trek out to our place, you can donate online at www.chwkfirecharity.ca.

You know that phrase: "Underpromise but overdeliver"? We're doing a bit of that this year. We had our neighbourhood kick-off party early this year, and since we had so many eager lookie-loos who stopped by last night to sneak a peek from their warm vehicles (while we were all outside freezing, LOL), we can't with any good conscience not have a show tonight before December rolls around on the calendar. Yeah, that's right. We're breaking tradition and starting on November 30 th...is year. We'll just call it an extra bonus day to celebrate our 10th year of the show and how far we've come since 2010! Visit www.diamondcrescent.com for more details.

This was the view from our window at the start of our day. The snow line is getting close to the valley floor, and our musical Christmas light show is only a week away! Come see us at 7620 Diamond Crescent starting at 5 PM on December 1 until the 31st. Visit www.diamondcrescent.com for more info.

While you're decorating your home again for December and stumble across a few strings of dead LED Christmas lights, don't throw them away out of frustration... we're willing to take them off your hands. We'll try to fix them up, and what can't be fixed will be dropped off for recycling. The plan is to do another fun decorating project with our kids to light up the neighbourhood a bit more this December. Just place your defective LED strings into a bag and set them out on the grass beside our curb at 7620 Diamond Crescent and we'll take care of the rest. Heck, we're even willing to take your unwanted *working* LED light strings too! P.S. Shhhh! Don't tell our kids... it's a secret. P.P.S. Feel free to share this post to get the word out! Thanks!

This hobby involves a very wide range of skill sets from soldering circuit boards, building items in the yard, touchy-feely artistic skills, and general computer geekery to round it off. Something we're dabbling with now is 3D printing which allows us to manufacture custom items. This video shows us printing a mount for one of our security cameras to keep watchful eye on things around the yard. We plan to design and print a few more things over the next few months in preparation for our show in December 2020...

The early bird gets the worm! Today, this early bird got the boom lift. Apparently they're in high demand at rental shops during November and December by people putting up their Christmas lights, so we rented one today for some prep work to make our new soffit lighting attach quickly and easily this November without needing a boom lift again this year, nor in future years.

Greetings from Canada's capital! Ottawa certainly pulls out all the stops when it comes to Canada Day celebrations. They even start a day early! While there are official Canada Day activities today, the technical testing and rehearsal for tomorrow's big show is tonight, complete with famous singers in sweatpants. P.S. Sorry, but our musical light show will never be THIS good...

Even without an entire weekend to dedicate to working on the lights, the longer daylight hours as summer approaches makes it easier to spend an evening at it. The new strip lighting (to replace our floodlights which are a nuisance to dig up when they get buried under snow) was tested this evening once the sun went down, and they're looking good! Although the test mode on the controller looks like a bit of a visual train wreck, the extra set of strip lights for each section of the house makes it possible to have a nice two-tone effect that we were after. It should only get better from here!

So, what's in the plan when the wife and kids are away for the weekend? Long-delayed light upgrades! What else? It's hard to believe that after spending the better part of a weekend working, this picture makes it LOOK like there isn't much to show for it. ... But come December, it will all be worthwhile!

So, we're selling some household stuff on Craigslist and somebody came to pick an item up. Here's how it sort of went: Buyer: "When you gave me your address, I knew where Diamond Crescent was because it has that house with all the Christmas Lights." Me: "Well, that's actually *our* house." Buyer: "Cool! I didn't recognize it as being the same house without all the lights on it."... This isn't the first time a conversation like this happened. I guess we're famous!

After being "so smart" by buying a snowblower back in October and having December pass by with nary a snowflake, here we are about mid-February strategizing how to clear the sidewalk and driveway for December 2019 without burying our lights.

We went out on a mini road trip earlier today to bring this 2" tubing home in the back of the truck. Now to start making something out of it... P.S. Sorry if today's Christmas-related activity was the cause of our sudden cold weather snap!

With the relatively nice weather we had this winter, we finished putting everything away about a month earlier than last year. The house looks so plain now! But we'd like to take a moment to say that we collected about $600 for the Chilliwack Firefighters Charitable Society this past season from our viewers. Thank you, Chilliwack!

In the past, if the weather co-operated, we've typically dismantled our display on January 1, but since other family activities were going on, they're still up. We've decided to extend our post-Christmas show until Friday!

If you've come to see us this December already, we're glad you came! Now there's a reason to come yet again: starting on Boxing Day and up until New Year's Eve, we're playing a different set of songs. While you're out again on Diamond Crescent, we were hoping that you could do us a favour... If you have any old LED Christmas light strings that aren't lighting up properly and were just going to throw them away out of frustration, we're willing to take them off your hands. We'l...l try to fix them up, and what can't be fixed will be dropped off for recycling. The plan is to do another fun decorating project with our kids to light up the neighbourhood a bit more next December. Just place your defective LED strings into a bag and set them out on the grass beside our FM sign at the curb and we'll take care of the rest. Heck, we're even willing to take your unwanted *working* LED light strings too! P.S. Shhhh! Don't tell our girls... it's a secret. P.P.S. Feel free to share this post to get the word out! Be sure to use the "Include Original Post" option when sharing because otherwise Facebook shares only the video without our write-up asking for unwanted lights. Thanks!

Merry Christmas! With Christmas and Boxing Days landing mid-week, you may be scratching your head wondering when your recycling (including wrapping paper), compostable items, real Christmas tree, andmost notablygarbage will be picked up. Chilliwack's Curbside Collection app (or visiting www.chilliwack.com/curbside) will tell you that, plus tips on what goes in what bin.

As we head into the weekend and closer to Christmasand it gets busier on our streetwe're hoping that people take a moment to read over www.diamondcrescent.com/the-ground-rules before heading out to watch the show. Most importantly, please remember to keep your stereo volume levels low. Bass has a tendency to travel far, so we've recently had to flatten the bass a bit on the song "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" as it's the one that we've heard the most inside our home when the... show is on. I'm sure our neighbours have heard it too and we would like to stay on their good side. Regarding headlights: having some discussions with some others who have come to enjoy the show, a common complaint are are those who drive up and park facing the front of others' vehicles, therefore shining their lights into other people's eyes. Please turn off your headlights (and perhaps keep your parking lights on to indicate to other drivers that you're there watching the show). If your daytime running lights remain on, setting your parking brake usually turns them off, or if that doesn't work, you can try setting your parking brake, and turning the engine off and on again. Or perhaps just keep your engine off to save some fuel and only run your engine to use the defrost if your windows fog up? Either way, remember to turn your headlights back on before heading home! Thanks for your understanding, and keeping it enjoyable for others!

Christmas is coming up quick, and mid-week is the best time to see our show without contending with other traffic in front of our house. If you haven't seen our show yet this year or would like to see it again, the next few days would be the best time to do itbefore the weekend and Christmas Eve show traffic begins. Or... if you can't make it out, maybe you can get your Christmas light fix with this YouTube video.

More rock n' roll carolling by Sam Roberts Band, Kelly Prescott, and Sierra Noble on the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train!

Here Comes Santa Claus on the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train! (Referring to the name of the song... Santa wasn't actually on the train )

There's rain in the forecast for this evening, but if you're willing to get a bit wet, the CPR Holiday Train is scheduled to come to Agassiz tonight at 5:05 PM. There is something to be said about seeing a train decked out in rope-light art, have a stage flip down from one of its cars, and enjoy music by famous Canadian musicians! If you have friends or family that live down the valley, the train will also be stopping tonight in Haney-Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows. Tomorrow it... will be stopping in Port Moody and Port Coquitlam. Check out their web site for more info. P.S. If the train seems to be running late (which it has in the past), the web site has a link to the CP Holiday Train Tracker which shows a map of where the train is... hopefully approximately? Update: well... it's not as accurate as one would hope. While the train was in Agassiz, the map shown them it being way past the other side of Hope. Apparently they were delayed by a large rock that slid onto the tracks.

Another Christmas Light display worth stopping at which is about three minutes away from our place. It's hard to believe that there's a house somewhere behind all those wireframes!

This is another Christmas light display in the Chilliwack area that our kids love...

If our lights malfunction, our viewers don't like itand neither do we! Although our pixels are rated to be waterproof, conditions like strong wind and heavy rain like what we've had tonight puts them to the test. Not to single any company out, but when driving home tonight, this sign at Chilliwack Mall was a reminder of our various quick-fixes we have ready to go. Here are few of our secrets: For example, all of our bushes use identical strings; if one goes wonky, we can swa...p one out in a few minutes. We have spare pre-built mini spiral trees too. Our Mega Tree's pixel strips are held in place with teacup hooks and bungee cords with a spare set ready to be installed with the aid of a ladder. Our zigzag trees and first-floor lights can either be taken down or be fixed in place using a traditional soldering iron or using heat shrink solder sleeves which require nothing more than a well-aimed heat gun. Heck, earlier this week, a fix was as simple as tightening a loose screw! Since being up on a wet or icy roof is the last place we want to be in December to perform a fix, our upper-floor living room garland and the roofline above each have TWO sets of lights! It's sort of a party trick that blends into the night. If one goes bad, we just deactivate it and activate the other. In fact, we already had to do it a few weeks ago, and were able to fix the bad string when the roof was dry. P.S. I thought that the Canadian spelling would be "Safe Eh"?