How We Got Started

We started decorating our house in 1987. The first year we had no more than five or six strings of lights. Each year we added a little bit more, but still, our light display was nothing to get excited about.

By 1993 we began to expand our horizons a bit. We started to decorate the trees in front of the house and put up some wire sculptures. We thought we were getting an impressive display and then we saw the Festival of lights at the Mormon Temple outside of Washington DC. After seeing that display, we knew that we needed something more dramatic.

The following year we greatly increased the number of lights to about 8,000. Still we wanted more. In 1995 we added a nativity set, more wire sculptures and started to decorate the back of the house, which was visible from the adjoining street.

During the 1995 Christmas season, we saw the Holiday of Lights at Bull Run Park which was a real inspiration to us. Unfortunately, the display was not repeated during the 1996 Christmas season. However, we were able to visit a similar festival called Winter Lights. This festival was held in Seneca Creek Park in Gaithersburg, MD. A light festival has since returned to Bull Run, but quite frankly, it was not up to the standards of the 1995 show. We did however travel to Columbia, MD for the Symphony of Lights . This show has run for a number of years now and is well worth the trip! However the best show we've ever seen is the Celebration of Lights at Harwood located in Allegheny County PA, somewhere North of Pittsburgh. One drive through and we've got enough new ideas to last us years!

These light festivals inspired us to expand our displays and try some animation. For the 1996 lighting season, we added some animation. We did a series of squirrel wire sculptures which were lit in sequence to give the illusion of movement. Frosty's tree lot was another feature added. We put an illuminated Frosty the Snowman in a booth surrounded with trees decorated to look like frosted cut-out cookies. For the 1997 season we added an animated light sculpture which consisted of a bear climbing a candy cane, then falling off. We also reworked our "virtual tree" using a Basic Stamp computer controlling a bank of X10 dimmers to gradually change the color of the tree from green to red then to white and back to green. This year we ended up with approximately 25,000 lights.

In 1996 our efforts were recognized in an article in the December 20th issue of the Prince William Journal Last year pictures of our lights appeared in The Manassas Journal and on the CNN Interactive web site.

For the 1998 lighting season, we put up over 33,000 lights. Two new animations were featured, an animated Jack-in-the-box and a toy soldier firing a cannon. We added icicle lights around the house, moved Santa, his reindeer and sleigh to the roof, added another ten lightposts and expanded the Nativity set. We were interviewed by two radio stations, WMAL and Z104. You can listen to the WMAL interview by clicking here

In 1999 we put up somewhere around 41,000 lights. Our animation project this year consisted of a pair of ice skaters gliding across a frozen pond. Articles were published about our lights in two Manassas area papers: The Daily Journal, The Manassas Journal Messenger as well as the New York Times. We were interviewed by WTOP Radio and were part of a TV program called "America America" which airs in Brazil.

For the Christmas 2000 season we're planning to put up between 55-60,000 lights. If you want to come and see us, the lights will be turned on by the Saturday after Thanksgiving. They are on each night from dusk to at least 11:00 and will be lit till January 4th. Come and see us then