Going Social

I’ve had a mish mash of social media over the years with a couple of accounts that I use to promote the Christmas light display and share my projects. This year because I am building a photo op prop I thought it would be good to have some consistency across the social media accounts I use (inspired by the props I saw in South Calgary last year & their use of social in the picture area).

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We have a plan

Here we are at the halfway point between the lights turning last season and the lights turning on for this season and we seem to have a plan. I toyed with a few ideas of what to change and what to add, where I finally settled is changing the left hand side of the house to a walk through area with the donation bin inside a “Santa House” that can double as a photo op as well as adding two additional pixel panels to the lower section of the house beside the garage.

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We are live, Christmas 2021

Not a lot of items got completed on schedule, but fortunately the schedule was forgiving enough that I got everything finished with about 3 hours to spare. Unfortunately because of current COVID restrictions we could not have our usual light up party for the 2nd straight year. This severely impacts our fundraising efforts as we traditionally collect about 50% of the donations on the first night from friends and family.

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Half way through the ’21 install

Time flies when you are not getting much done. Here we are half way through my install schedule, I’ve had a couple of weekends that haven’t been as productive as intended but have been trying to catch up as best I can. With Halloween behind us it will be an all out push to light up.

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The transition from build to install

Last weekend (Canadian Thanksgiving) marks the transition from build activities to installing the lights. That doesn’t mean I don’t still have things to build but I do need to start putting up lights to keep to my install schedule. A few weeks ago it felt like I had lots of time to do all the things I needed to but now time is feeling short.

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We are a go

I’ve spent much of this year debating if I would do a big light show this season. After much consideration the excitement has built enough for me to commit to building another show this year. We will go live 3 months from today on November 27th, hopefully we will be able to have a light up party with a road hockey game and people in our house again. I really missed not having the light up party last season.

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We’re half way there ’21.

It’s hard to believe but we are already at the midway point between turning off the lights on January 2nd and the official Light up on November 27th.

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That’s a Wrap

All the lights are taken down and put away, which puts the final bow on the 2020 Christmas season. The teardown was completed earlier this year than it ever has been in the past, we had some good weather early January then a really nice March which allowed me to get it all finished up early. We are also still under struck lockdown conditions so have no commitments with the kids. Being done by Easter is usually a good year, this year we were done by the spring solstice.

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We are Live, 2020

At 6pm on November 28th the lights turned on for the season. Our usual light up party had to change due to restrictions on gatherings and the number of visitors to ones home. We managed to reconfigure the event to have a drive by bottle drive for the McKnight Atom hockey teams and also collect food for the Calgary Food Bank. Although it wasn’t the event it usually is, it was great to see many faces I haven’t seen in the last 8 months and have a short socially distanced chat with friends when they were dropping food and bottles off.

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2 Weeks to Light up

Its now only two weeks to our official light up on Nov 28th. I fell a little behind schedule on the install over the last couple of weeks but knew I could make it up this week as I had 3 days off work.

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