DownsFamilyChristmas.com

Sometimes it’s a bit hard to get motivated to do a display like ours. There’s a lot of tedious work that goes into setting it all up, not to mention the long hours spent in front of the computer programming the actual show. But God has a way of pushing the right buttons this time of year…..

We had noticed one time over the Christmas week that a limousine had pulled up, and the people inside got out and watched for awhile. They showed up and left in about 30 minutes, no big deal.

This past week my wife heard about a four year old adopted Korean girl in her women’s bible study. I think she’s the granddaughter of one of the women in the group. Anyway, shortly after she arrived in this country, she came down with leukemia. To top it off, just subjecting her to chemotherapy runs a huge risk of killing her, as her liver is unable to process the chemicals properly. Before her second treatment which runs a 25% chance of killing her, the church they belong to decided to do something wonderful for her. They arranged to get a limo and take her out to see a certain Christmas display……

Worth it? I’d set the whole thing back up today for that!

Definitely not the most fun part of the job…. taking everything down. It’ll probably take a couple of weeks to get it all finished, depending on the weather.

Also trying to come up with new stuff for next year. This is definitely a part-time but all year job! I’m playing with lasers and moving yoke lights, as well as flashers and other thoughts we’ll just keep under wraps for now.

OK, so we uploaded all of our new videos to vimeo, because the quality is better than youtube and frankly it’s easier to use. But just for fun, I uploaded the same Let It Snow video to YouTube. For some reason, the hits on the video on YouTube were going up fairly quickly, and we never actually told anybody about it.

However, just go to www.briansetzer.com and you’ll see why…

Like we do each evening when the show starts (6:00), we went outside to make sure everything powers up correctly. Since we had major storms last night, there’s always a worry that things don’t go as planned.

Well, we noticed that the entire roof and house didn’t power up! Yikes! So I scramble to the back of the house, and simply grab a connection where two extension cords are plugged together! Voila! Roof and house come back on!

All the high tech stuff in the world…. and a single extension cord caused all that problem!

Well, I spent a couple of hours tonight fixing LED light strands that quit working because it’s just plain too warm! Who knew we’d have 76 degrees on December 26th?

Unfortunately, I was one of the people who bought a large amount of LED strings from Creative Displays, and their supplier kind of ‘did a number’ on them with product quality. CDI is stepping up to the plate and swapping all of the light strands for new product next year, but this doesn’t help a whole lot during this Christmas season. So, I spend a bit of time each and every day replacing strings that just die for no particular reason.