Car crash, heavy traffic turn out Christmas light show(Clark Griswold had nothing on this homeowner)

The Oxford Press ^ | 12/7/05 | Richard Wilson

[Diddle E. Squat]

DEERFIELD TWP. — Sheriff's deputies asked the owner who lit up his house with 25,000 Christmas lights synched to music to turn off the display after a traffic accident Tuesday night.

Deerfield Twp. resident Carson Williams agreed to shut down his holiday decorations indefinitely.

Williams told a Cincinnati television station that sheriff's deputies could not reach the traffic accident because of the traffic lined up in his neighborhood.

The display caught attention across the nation on network TV and on the Internet because the lights on the Williams house and filling their yard are synchronized by computer with music broadcast to car radios. There are three songs in the 12-minute display: Frosty the Snowman by the Jackson 5; God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood and Wizards of Winter by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Williams turned his display on the week of Thanksgiving and motorists have lined up between 6 and 10 p.m. ever since.

For the time being, the only place to view the Williams' display will be online.

"He told us if we start having traffic problems that he would shut the display down for a while," Warren County sheriff's Lt. Ed Petrey said Wednesday morning.

Two cars collided in a minor accident at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday on Simpson Creek Drive, which leads to Winding Creek Court, where the Williams live near Mason in southern Warren County. No one was injured.

Williams is an electrical engineer who said his family spent about $10,000 on the display. He had promised his neighbors they would shut it down if there were problems.

"If I get a single complaint I'll shut it down," Carson had said Monday night.

He could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

[Alouette]

Please enlighten to what they have in mind if it's not peace?

The "chicken scratch" symbol was invented by the No Nukes crowd, using the semaphoric symbols for N and D to stand for "Nuclear Disarmament."

But those who use this symbol want only the U.S. and other Western nations to disarm, not the Iranians or the North Koreans.

[Alouette]

Wow! That is neat!

Your house is the same size and style as mine, but I don't have any lights, well, other than the front door light.

[armymarinemom]

Really? Please enlighten to what they have in mind if it's not peace?

It's a political symbol that almost helped us loose the cold war. Now a cross would have been a perfect symbol for peace but they had to ruin the whole thing by sticking a political symbol in the middle.

[Smokin' Joe]

WOW!

[red irish]

I love the US military it was the only thing my dad gave me. God bless them and their families.

[billbears]

It's a political symbol that almost helped us loose the cold war.

Wow. Political symbols almost 'helped' us lose the cold war? Putting a bit much into a symbol aren't you? BTW, it started as a symbol for nuclear disarmament in the 1950s (that is unless you believe the kookier sites about Nero's Cross and Celtic symbols for death). And we have a problem with nuclear disarmament why again? What about those treaties signed by great men like Nixon and Reagan?

[John O]

beautiful. Tasteful, elegant, and pretty all in one. Great job!

[armymarinemom]

Wow. Political symbols almost 'helped' us lose the cold war? Putting a bit much into a symbol aren't you? BTW, it started as a symbol for nuclear disarmament in the 1950s (

It was used by protesters during the cold war who tried to tie our hands in defense. Had Reagan listened to them we would have lost the Cold War.

Try as you might it was political then and political now.

[armymarinemom]

love the US military it was the only thing my dad gave me. God bless them and their families.

Will pass the word to my sons. Glad they are armed as well as China and Iran.

[armymarinedad]

And we have a problem with nuclear disarmament why again?

Because North Korea has them and Iran wants them.

[armymarinedad]

Code Pink said those cancellations denied them the "safety in numbers" they felt they needed-

Now you have to go out and buy a pink shirt with A BIG YELLOW STRIPE DOWN THE BACK to wear on Friday nights.

[billbears]

It was used by protesters during the cold war who tried to tie our hands in defense

Yes, protestors standing on the streets 'tied' the national government's hands. You know you're crediting a small minority of people quite a bit. Of course if it was a larger group, shouldn't they have a say in the political realm? Or do they not deserve it because they wanted peace?

Had Reagan listened to them we would have lost the Cold War

And yet he and Nixon both signed nuclear disarmament treaties, the very purpose for the peace symbol in 1958.

Try as you might it was political then and political now.

That can be said about anything. The energy this guy spends on the lights could be considered political by some. Not very much the conservationist is he?

My point is 'conservatives' need to quit complaining about every damn thing surrounding this time of year and just enjoy the light show as it was intended!!

[billbears]

Yes, Lord knows we need hundreds, if not thousands, of nuclear warheads to fight off two third world nations (one of which we're giving thousands of tons of grain to). Because the first thousand or so may miss their target.

[Steve Van Doorn]

bump to show wife latter :)

[CharlesWayneCT]

THanks to all of you who commented nicely about my lights. It motivates me to get working to finish the job this year, i've been running a bit behind....

[John O]

We will of course want pictures. (No good idea on FR will ever go unstolen!)

[bjcintennessee]

ping

[CharlesWayneCT]

I've "finished" my lights for this year, I put a couple at my blog but I couldn't get picture links to work from there so I've put them up on my "maj.com" picture site (which I only have because I use "brickshelf.com" to host a few lego pictures.....).

In this picture, you see the house as it looks as you approach it on the road. I've moved the flag to the roof, to get it out of the way of a new tree but also it is much more prominent. As you approach, it seems to move from the wall to "floating", as you will see in the next picture. I've put up lots of hooks, and build structures using cpvc water pipes, sometime gluing and sometimes using screws. This lets me take things apart and store them as long thin pipes.:

Here's the view you see as you pull up. If you look on the left, you can see a tree from my back yard, it's 2000 lights staked to the ground and hoisted up into a tree. I've got about 5000 lights in the back yard that are barely visible from the front, but we can see them from windows).

I use 8 timers on 6 circuits for this light display (2 circuits are 20-amp circuits, and most timers only do 15 so I have 2 timers on each of them). I also have 2 light sensors to control the lights attached to the house, which come on first and turn off last. There are about 4100 lights physically attached to the house. I put a few red lights in the green light sets around the windows/porch/garage to make it look like holly.

This is a view from another angle. I didn't used to like metal sculptures, but a few years back I decided deer were "natural" enough. I'll never have santa or his sled, but if I ever catch a break on a 50 percent off sale, I might add a polar bear or a snowman (we don't usually get enough snow for a real snowman, although if you look carefully you will see the remains of a snow fort we built (a big mound of snow which the kids dig holes in).

In this view you can also see another tree in the back yard, it's all the way on the right. We call this the "bear tree", because from our kitchen window it looks like a bear, swaying in the breeze like it is lumbering up the yard. It is a simple 14-foot pine tree, and I put about 2000 lights in it this year.

I have several artificial trees I've picked up after christmas, I set them up outside and put lights on them. Here are two surrounding my front door, which has a wreath that a kind neighbor gave me one year in appreciation for my lights (I don't advertise my lights, so we get little traffic, but most of the people in the neighborhood know about them and come by).

I sadly had my front-yard tree die this year, I left a little of it, painted it white, and covered it in about 1300 blue lights:

This is what it looked like the previous year, when it had about 3000 lights in it:

I didn't like how white the deer looked, so after christmas last year my daughter and I picked several colors and test-sprayed the deer until we found a color we liked. We ended up with a couple of different colors. I painted everything, including the lights, because the clear lights washed out the rest of the display. Here's a family of deer hiding under a holly tree (The holly tree is actually in my neighbor's yard, but they kindly let me put lights in the tree. I use clear lights to accentuate the green shiny leaves and red berries, this is the only place I like to use clear lights which are otherwise, as I said, too bright)).

My newest addition is my new fake blue tree. Since I had a lot of extra blue lights because of the dead tree, I needed a place to put them. A storm had blown over my roof-mounted TV antenna, and the mounting pole was sitting on the side of my house waiting to be discarded. It was about 10 feet tall, with legs, so I added a few feet with another tube, painted the whole thing copper, and built a tree around it, containing about 2200 lights, mostly blue with a few hundred purple lights:

Last year the most dissapointing tree to me was my big red "fire" tree (look at the picture in a previous post, you see it on the right, the tree is 40 feet tall and I had lights draped down it). The problem was first that I didn't like the draped lights, and 2nd that every big wind blew the lights around in the tree so they would end up bunched and I'd have to get out the pole and fix them (I use a long pole made of a stick and a 16-foot telespoping pool-cleaner pole). Anyway, this year I decided to go horizontal instead of vertical, and I also decided to accent the red with some green. The tree isn't very full, so I'm not entirely happy with the effort, but next year if I can figure out a way to work around the tree (it's almost 50 feet from the right side since there's a steep hill) I'll do this again, I like it much better than last year. There are about 3750 lights in this tree, it probably needs about 1000 more.

The first couple of years, I was annoyed by the light pole in the middle of my display. Then I decided I'd make it into something. I got a flexible dryer vent, bent it into a candy-cane top shape, and filled it with spray-foam insulation. I attach it to the top, and wrap the entire thing with about 600 multi-colored lights (these were too bright, so I removed all the "orange" lights and replaced them with darker red/green/blue lights). And in case you are wondering, I moved the camera when taking this picture, not on purpose.

I hope you have enjoyed my lights. I may make a vanity post of this as a standalone, with a little more write-up.

[John O]

WOW. Great job. If you post more pictures please let me know.

And to think I was once proud of my couple of strings over the porch roof.

[Sweet_Sunflower29]

Excellent job, thanks for the update!