That’s a wrap ’21

That’s a wrap on another successful season, time to put a bow on it and store it all away for another year.

The last night of the light show was on Jan 2nd, on the 3rd it felt very quiet and dark.

Videos from this season can be found here, I have more to edit but I recorded them in 4K and my tablet does not have the power to edit them so they likely won’t get published.

We had a very productive season for the Calgary Food Bank collecting $2,260.53 and almost 500lbs of food. Thank you to everyone who donated online or dropped off food.

Usually we have a few nights of non musical lights after the main show ends for Team Canada at the World Junior Hockey Championships but with the tournament shut down midway through it was dark from January 3rd on.

The weather in January was very cooperative so I could get most of the lights down pretty quickly after the light show ended, first removing the donation bin and sign so we could return it with our final food drop off and then the garage door banner.

On the 3rd weekend of January the weather was really nice, the snow on the ground was melting and the snow from the roof was all gone, it was a good time to make some progress on the teardown. I decided to attack the upper roof first, this went much better than planned and I managed to get all the lights off the house.

I also managed to get a lot of the ground items taken in, this was great news as the wires are often frozen into the ground until April.

The next weekend was the last in Jan and all that was left to take down was the two trees, progress had been tremendous so far.

That was it, by the end of January it was all taken down. It wasn’t all put away because I was upgrading my totes to the heavy duty Husky Tools ones I’d started buying a couple of seasons ago. They are much sturdier and stack nicer than the ones I had prior and I would spend a little time organizing them here and there. It was a good thing I got all the lights down in January because February had some deep cold spells (-30’c ish), frequent snow storms and we were very busy on weekends in Feb and March with the the kids activities.

Finally this weekend the weather looks like it is turning to spring weather so I could turn around my garage to summer configuration and store the lights away until October. This means moving all the lights to the back of the garage, taking the car out of winter storage and getting all the bikes down so we can start using them.

I was really happy with the new features I added (pixel pillars on the upper house, bucket lights) and the additional arches and north poles. Two of the new songs I added, Christmas Wrapping & J5 Medley I also really liked as they took full advantage of the new features. A new feature that I didn’t really take advantage of was the two signing trees I added. I managed to sequence a couple of songs but couldn’t really get into it, maybe next year.

Now that it is all put away its time to start thinking about what I do next year, or if I do anything at all. The “should I do it again?” question is one I am usually asking myself at this time of year. I’m usually leaning toward “no” until I decide to do some designs of what I may add if I do it again. Once I get a design and start testing a sequence on it I usually get pretty excited and get into it.

I am toying with a couple of Idea’s for 2022, that include building a Matrix panel on the roof of my garage, likely around 20’X10′ but this will be pretty complex to build and mount and quite expensive so likely wont happen, I am also thinking of adding matrix pillars to the garage similar to the ones I added to the upper level of the house this year, the last idea I am toying with is making a walk through area on the lawn to the donation bin with a more festive decorative feel with some more wooden cutouts. One last idea is to stick with what I had and focus on the sequencing side of it, getting the singing trees incorporated into more songs as well as cleaning up some of the songs that have been around since I started. I’ll likely wrestle with these questions for a few more months until I decide to do it all over again.