Happy holidays to everyone, I will see you all early next year! In the meantime, here are some incredible holiday light shows that have been making the rounds. I’m saving what is clearly the best for last.

The first one which has everyone going crazy is the Star Wars-themed light show a music teacher in Newark, California set up on his house. Using 100,000 Christmas lights and some cool siren-looking things on his roof, he synced the whole thing to various tunes from Star Wars. If you’re interested, this is usually done using specialized hardware known as a controller that your lights plug in to, then you plug the controller into your PC and run specialized software that tells the controller what to do with the lights. That’s a lot of control! Some companies like Light-O-Rama sell the whole thing as a kit.

Anyway, back to the Star Wars thing. It’s good, but there’s a guitar and a keyboard, and a bunch of identical small light-tree-things in the yard, I don’t know…it seems to me that there should have been some Star Wars content in the light show itself. The music and the visuals just don’t come together for me, but everyone else seems to love it, so if you haven’t seen it, here you go:

Taking it a step further is this next display from Yucaipa, California. This is especially impressive because setting up one house can be labor-intensive, but here there is an entire block of houses with all their lights synchronized to fourteen different songs. The only way to truly appreciate it is via drone footage, which is exactly what’s here. This video shows the lights dancing to Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Wizards of Winter, and I chose it because even though it’s not completely dark, it’s more impressive than their other footage, which shows the lights essentially just blinking on and off to Mariah Carey’s All I want for Christmas is You. The song is fine, but the accompanying light show didn’t hit the mark for me.

With that being said, here is a whole block’s Christmas lights all in sync!

But nothing tops this next one. You’ll understand why I think it’s so great when you see it, but it has actual animation, the display is related to the song, it’s not just a bunch of blinking lights, and in the description he mentions he has switched over to DMX control for the lights (they make both the hardware controllers and software)  and begun converting to LEDs, which will reduce power consumption significantly, usually about 95% – I’d estimate a total of $20 to run it for the season. Oh, and it’s a Halloween display. Watch it, and be in awe.

Be safe, be well, and enjoy your break!