What to do between Halloween and Christmas?

S

SoftwareGuy

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What do you all do after Halloween with your lights?

I'm thinking of putting up a fairly simple display for Halloween, mostly just to make sure I've got all the stuff I need for Christmas. It's fairly easy to get behind schedule and I don't want to get into December and find out I need something I didn't expect to run lights (this is my 2nd year). Plus, it'll be fun.

I'm in the USA and between Halloween and Christmas, we've got Thanksgiving so... Thanksgiving lights? What kind of color would you do for that? I could leave the lights off between Halloween and turn them on after Thanksgiving, but that'd be a little odd too.

Or maybe I just go full Christmas mode on November 1st.

Just curious for how everyone else approaches this situation.

(Hopefully this is the right place to post this question, if it's not, please move the thread or let me know where I should have posted this)
 
My daughters wedding is Oct 12th. IF I can get the outline and windows up, I'll probably do static orange on those and my landscape lights for halloween, then put up the rest of the props the next weekend. Don't want my props out during Halloween. :) Plan to start my show Mid November.
 
I don't have a lot up year around. But I do leave my Pixel Floods up and running. Most of the time they are running colors of the seasons. Pink, red, warm white for Valentines Day; Greens and gold for St. Patrick's Day; red, white blue for Memorial day to Labor day. You get the idea. I run fall colors until October, then switch to Halloween. After Halloween I go back to Fall until I switch to Christmas.
 
I am officially dark between Halloween and Thanksgiving. In reality driving by any night in that time period you will see this funny looking guy puttering about in a sea of lights doing coordinated patterns. If you look really close you can see the setup errors he is trying to fix. Be nice to him. He is under a lot of stress. :)
 
I don't use RGB, all my light are Led or incandescent Light, wire frames and blow up. it takes about 2 weeks for me to set up my Halloween lights and run test for my show. Nov 1st we start taking done all the Halloween and start setting up Christmas by thanksgiving night. My 2 daughters and I work most every evening until to dark to see. Last yr was my first yr of doing a true light show. The Mr. Christmas from Lowes/ Home Depot was ok. I see now that doing the light show with proper controllers and making the music really dance is so much wonderful.
 
Much like the OP, this is "officially" my 2nd year for having a full display (other years I had cobbled together some stuff but it wasn't a fully programmable show).

Last year, our house was the hit of the neighborhood because I had lights up on the house and we did several Halloween songs to music that was being broadcast via the FM transmitter to a big speaker in the driveway. Our neighborhood gets flooded with kids - we get something along the lines of 700+ visits, based on the number of candy pieces we hand out. We had people stopping in the yard to pose and take pictures...just crazy stuff... This year, the matrix will be out again, along with the lights on the house, and while we don't have super complex effects and sequences, we do have 3 or 4 songs that have video and the rest of the songs have pictures or text.

After Halloween, I leave the lights on the house and do nothing until Thanksgiving week where I'm setting up the last of the props in the yard for Christmas. I don't have a huge lot so it only takes me a day or two to get everything else set up and running.
 
This is my first year attempting to do Halloween. I don't have any plans to do anything between Halloween and Thanksgiving but at least I will have a significant head start for Christmas. I just need to swap out a few props
 
I do thanksgiving lights. I take down the ghosts and spider web. My plywood pumpkins are reversible. face on one side and plain pumpkin on the back. So the face turns toward the wall showing plain pumpkins for thanksgiving. An airblown turkey goes out. Then the pixel borders go a static pattern of harvest colors, orange, red, yellow, green.
 
Between Halloween and Christmas? Is there such a thing?

November 16, 2018 - Display is in the park, and we are manning the greeter's hut on multiple nights.
November 17, 2018 - Ideas for improvement of the animated light show are asked for and some even start giving them to us. (We are our own worse enemy. :blush: )
December 1, 2018 - Next year design takes on a look that we want to try to make happen.
January 1, 2019 - Tear down begins. While removing "Blinky" from the park, we are watching for improvements that can be made - and looking at what can be reused "next year" (2019).

- a LOT of stuff happened during the months between January and October. Some of it actually will get used in the new show. -

October 15, 2019 - Props are gathered at strategic locations around the park.
November 1, 2019 - Props are put into place, wiring begins.
November 22, 2019 - Show Time!

Cycle starts again.

So the short answer to your question of "What to do between Halloween and Christmas?" is: "Get as much sleep as you can, if you can."
 
Halloween comes down November 1st and Christmas starts going up. it normally takes me most of the month to get Christmas all put up and we light up ever Thanksgiving for Christmas. have for as long as I can remember.
October 1st-31st Halloween
Thanksgiving night -Dec 31st for Christmas
 
Christmas starts going up long before Halloween and Christmas display live on Thanksgiving night. 200 hours to setup display so I setup October and November. No time for Halloween... Can we move it to another month?
 
I started last year doing Halloween show and just leaving most things in place and add the Christmas show items. Reading this makes me think I could put some turkey animations on the grid and trees and also some soft Autumn colors on the pixels with no sounds. Then flip the switch on Black Friday.
 
Atmos FX sells a fun turkey animation. My kids loved watching the turkey running back and forth all month.
 
That unit is in the budget for my show expansion next year. Do you know if the videos can be triggered by Vixen or a PI player?
 
I play Adam Sandler's Thanksgiving Song (Saturday Night Live). My PVC arches get fitted with fan-like string light arrangements, so that they look like NBC peacocks (or turkeys). Certainly easy to power inject. I immediately recolor all my pixels using new Xlights sequences so that there is a lot less white (from Halloween), a little less red, no purple, and replace it with more orange and yellow. I share my Xlights Layout between Halloween and Thanksgiving--since that is, after all, what I am doing for real.

Everybody knows you're retooling your house/venue for Christmas during that time. So I'm setting up my megatree and spinners on the house, and they just play Thanksgiving harvest colors at night and zero green. Overtly Christmas stuff like Santa Claus hats, candy canes, etc. wait until last. But regardless, if they're pixels, they're getting Thanksgiving colors until Black Friday. Or they're just not getting turned on.

I just had the same problem this month, from setting up for Halloween early. I just played my pixels blue-on-top and yellow-on-bottom, in Ukraine flag colors. But now that it's the end of the month, I switched to Halloween.
 
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TomsLEDs said:
That unit is in the budget for my show expansion next year. Do you know if the videos can be triggered by Vixen or a PI player?
Click to expand...

you don't need to buy anything besides the videos. They come as MP4 files. Most of the videos are in the $10-30 range.

I use the turkey on my projector. FPP plays the video file out the HDMI port directly to the projector which projects on the inside of the blinds in the front room. That's all that particular FPP does. It runs as it's own master. Basically just powers up the projector at a certain time, loops the video over and over until midnight, then powers it down.

If you wanted to play it on a matrix you could use the video file in a video effect in vixen and export it and play it as a sequence on a pi. (assuming you have it set up the way most people in the Christmas hobby have them set up, as opposed to as a video display)
 
My matrix display is not high enough resolution, so was hoping to trigger videos to play on the projector when called out by Vixen on the FPP.
 
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