Winter Snowland

Creating an elaborate Christmas display has been a tradition of mine for 30+ years now.I built my first Christmas display in 1987. Each year the holiday display has grown in size and in power. Today the Christmas display covers just about every inch of our front yard and most of the roof.

 

It takes a lot of work to plan out the locations where everything will be placed. I really have to plan the electrical wiring carefully because the Christmas display takes a lot of power. It uses about 70 amps. In fact, I burned up the main breaker in 2001. As you can imagine, the power used by this holiday display gives me a shock in January when the power bill arrives from the City of Burbank. Since 2006 we have been adding LED lights to the display to reduce energy. Over the last 13 years of adding LED lights we have dropped over 30 amps of power on the display. The power consumption of the display is now way down and the display has never been brighter! I am sure you can see it from space now!

 

The kids enjoy watching all of the animation and looking at thousands of Christmas lights. The holiday display has won lots of awards over the years and has been featured behind the weather on the major TV networks. In 2001, this holiday display was shown live on National TV (NBC Today Show - Weekend Edition) when I was interviewed by David Bloom live from New York Time Square. In 2000, it was one of the major topics of discussion on CBS's Early Show with Brian Gumble. It was also shown on TV from coast to coast both those years. The display has also been Featured on HGTV. We were 1 of the 8 homes across the country the show chose to be on there Christmas special that year. We were also featured in David Seidman’s new book in 2003 called Holiday Lights. It is available on Amazon to buy. 

 

The display was a solo project for a lot of years. I was really the only one in my family that was crazy enough to get into this. But as time went on and the display grew my mother and grandmother became more involved in the display. My grandmother took over the job and paints and maintains all of the people and characters in the display. She paints all of them from there faces to there clothes and anything else they need. She also created the 2 stuffed reindeer that are sitting on the bench drinking coffee. She hand made them from scratch. They are one of my favorite scenes in the display. My mom also paints and helps me with the big paint jobs that need to be done like the train, houses, church or Santa's sleigh. She also is a big help when it comes time to put the display away. The display take about 3 to 4 weeks to assemble starting on November 1st. And it's amazing that we can get the whole display taken down, unassembled and put away in the attic and storage shed all in one day. This is to the help of my mom, she really knows how to keep it organized and in order for the next year. 

 

Thank you for stopping by my website and I hope you enjoy the pictures and the Youtube videos. If you live in the area or are visiting from out of town and it is December please come by and see the display in person. There is nothing better then seeing it live with the music and all the animation going. It is on nightly in December from 6pm to 9pm daily unless rain is in the forecast for that evening then it will be off.  On the weekends the forecast calls for Snow!

​

Merry Christmas from our family to yours

​