Right about now, you’re starting to see the first twinkling of holiday lighting. Even among industry professionals, the red and green waves that presage Christmas quickly blend into the background. That is, until you turn the corner on a neighborhood like Howard Beach, in Queens, N.Y., where traffic slows to a crawl for over a month as people converge from the tri-state area to gawk at lighting displays that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Holiday lighting — what goes up and gets turned on between Halloween and New Year’s — adds a billion-dollar bump to the overall lighting industry, according to the American Holiday Decorators Association (AHDA) in Tewksbury, Mass. Organization president Bobby Cooper estimates that over 2,000 companies specialize in designing and installing holiday lighting in the U.S. “And there’s enough work for 6,000 of them,” he adds.
Holiday lighting has a long history. Placing lighted candles on a Christmas tree is a tradition going back hundreds of years, as is the spike in the number of house fires around that same time of year. The first recorded electrically illuminated Christmas tree was created by Edward H. Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison, who displayed his Christmas tree decked with 80 hand-wired red, white and blue electric incandescent bulbs, on Dec. 22, 1882 at his home on New York’s Fifth Avenue. By 1900, businesses started stringing up Christmas lights behind their windows, beginning what would become a huge commercial application of holiday lighting.
But the next big change didn’t take place until relatively recently, when the LED began to replace the incandescent bulb in Christmas lights. At almost the same time, PC-based automation systems were increasingly combined with LEDs to produce spectacular, traffic-clogging displays. And it was at this point that the lines between professional holiday lighting and “pro-sumer” efforts began to converge, propelled by a cadre of enthusiasts determined not to let the model railroad buffs have all the fun during the season.
“A whole other industry has formed in the last five years, where a bunch of computer geeks said, ‘We can do this,’” says Chuck Smith, a retired electrical engineer in Franklin, Tenn., who counts himself among their ranks and has turned his own passion for Christmas lighting technology into a year-round consulting gig for residential and commercial clients via his Planet Christmas Consulting Group. “Once you had the LED in place giving you purer, brighter colors and more reliability, you had people hooking up their PCs and in some cases literally transitioning to DMX and Wholehogs and synching music to the displays. It was no longer a display but a show.”
Smith says the higher cost of electricity is more than offset by the lower power consumption of LED light, which themselves are coming down in cost as they reach new economies of manufacturing scale, enabling more people to access the technology. It’s led to a slew of new ventures to feed into the frenetic niche. One of the leading ones is Animated Lighting, a Web-based Kansas City company that sells its own automation software as well as programming services. Paul Smith (a lot of Smiths in this business) started the company in 2002 and says demand has grown dramatically for his software app Animation Director, which costs $350 and offers sophisticated programming capabilities, and the more recent, down-market Maestro software, a plug-and-play app that brings automation to a wider audience. “The market has grown tremendously since we started in 2002,” says Smith. “It’s gone from high-end homes to shopping centers, amusement parks and zoos, and it’s going beyond Christmas — retailers and other companies are adapting the software and LED colors for other types of holidays.”
Smith says the market is evolving along familiar lines in the technology arena. What began as a passionate hobby proliferates as the cost of software-based products declines, followed by a new breed of enthusiast that is willing to pay to take a display to the next level. “Six years ago, $500 bought you some lights and basic automation,” he says. “Today, the average is around $2,000, and that’s just the hobbyist. A commercial display could easily run $20,000. For that they get controllers, lights and a lot of engineering support from us.” Shows are now stored on SD cards, which can be switched out for various holidays. Still, 70 percent of Animated Lighting’s revenues come during the Halloween/Christmas season.
One of the more passionate enthusiasts, Carson Williams, a Mason, Ohio, electrical engineer, had his elaborate home automated lighting show (www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmgf60CI_ks ) used in a holiday commercial for Miller Beer. It was a moment that everyone in this new industry sector references and it set the stage for Christmas lighting to take on new significance for retail and advertising applications. “Christmas lighting has become an extension of digital signage,” says Chuck Smith of Planet Christmas Consulting. “LEDs are outdoor-rated now, and it’s like an arms race to see who can create the brightest, most elaborate lighting shows for their homes and businesses. It’s not what you’d call an old-fashioned Christmas anymore.”
