It started with a simple bet. In November 2005, one of my employees received a widely circulated email (Video 1) showing a house in Mason, Ohio that had its Christmas lights synchronized to music. Almost everyone in the office thought it was cool but faked, understandable since computerized displays were not common at the time.

I was not convinced that it was faked and made a $5 bet. I spent over a week researching how it was done. I won the bet, but being the geek I am, I had to try this myself. It looked easy enough, or so I thought.

Knowing I was going to build my own display, I hit up all the after Christmas sales and bought as many LED lights and lighted decorations as I could. I had my lights, now all I need was the Light-O-Rama computers. Originally I was only going to have 3 LOR systems, giving me 48 channels (independent circuits). As the season got closer and the ideas started to come together, I decided to make the show bigger and ended up with 6 LORs, 96 channels, and 20,600 lights, officially making it bigger than the show that was my inspiration.

After 7 weeks of setup, my first show opened on Thanksgiving 2006 (Video 2). The show was an instant success. People came from everywhere to see it, even from other states (Video 3). The closer it got to Christmas, the longer the lines got. On the weekend there were wait times of over 2 hours to see the show. It was crazy.

The show was also a fund raiser for Make-A-Wish Foundation. By the end of the show, we had raised $20,000. Not bad considering my goal was $2000.

With the good came the bad. Traffic was horrendous because people wanted to stay to see multiple cycles of the show, we were short-handed, and I had no life for five weeks. The last show was Christmas night. In five weeks an estimated 60,000 people had seen the show. Contrary to rumors, the show was not shut down by the police. It was just too much for the few people that came out to help. We were all exhausted after five weeks.

The show was a success but needed a new home. In 2007, I teamed up with the Grand Haven Rotary Club and moved the show to Harbor Island in Grand Haven, Michigan (Video 4). The challenge with Harbor Island was there were no houses, so we were going to have to build something. The idea was to erect 6 power poles and string cabling between them. The display was over 256 feet long and 40 feet high. Once again, the show was a complete success but almost came to an early end after a severe windstorm nearly ripped down the display.

Although the 2007 display was impressive, it lost of its charm by not being on a house. The decision was made to start over and design a facade of a house on Harbor Island for the 2008 show. This was a huge undertaking, very time consuming and expensive to build. If it were not for the Tri-Cities Habitat for Humanity helping to build the display, the show would not have happened.

The 2008 season started Thanksgiving night, and people were amazed at what we had accomplished. We had built a facade of a house, changed the orientation of the display for a better viewing, added laser animation on a 16 foot screen, added more lights, and even had all new music (Video 5). The display was better than ever.

The season started strong but then came the weather. Every weekend from Thanksgiving to Christmas had blizzard conditions. Unfortunately, the bad weather keep people away. If the weather wasn't bad enough, all the spare LED lights were stolen from the supply trailer, and the site was vandalized the last day of the show, so we never got to do the last show.

Anything that could go wrong went wrong in 2008. It was obvious that the theft, vandalism, and cost of building a set really made returning to Harbor Island not an option.

If the show was to go on, it needed to come home and once again be a solo project. This is where the show started and ultimately where it needs to be. No matter what we did on Harbor Island, it never recreated the feeling or look of that first year. There is just something about it being on a house in a neighborhood.

So how do you convince 13 neighbors to allow you to bring back your show? Turn it into a neighborhood project and have all 14 houses on the street be part of the show. At that moment, the idea for Holiday Road was born and was pitched to the neighbors, who graciously agreed. So if you know anyone that lives on Heather Court, be sure to thank them for allowing the show to continue.

Brad Boyink
Show Creator