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Musical Christmas Tree

Winona Lake, IN

Since 1987, in three different states

The Musical Christmas Tree is a 
legacy from back in the Olden 
Days when we did the programming 
for a Living Christmas Tree 
program at church. Not just any 
old church, but a rather large 
one with seating for 3000 and a 
program that ran for ten 
performances.

We moved on, and the big church 
updated hardware. The opportunity 
arose for us to fly 3000 miles 
and snatch the old control box from 
the very jaws of the bulldozer. We 
shipped it home along with about 1/4
mile of 12-wire cables (500 lb of them)
and repaired what we could, a process 
that is still going on. We started our 
"personal" display in 1995 with an
eight-foot, four-pointed star made of
chase lights that "chased" outward in
threes to give a pulsating effect. It
was replaced in 1997 with plywood 
silhouettes of Bethlehem and a manger 
scene. The new star was a cutout (seen 
in the first photo above) that had chase 
lights hidden from view to give a subtle 
"streaming" effect down to the baby Jesus.
No Frostys, Santas, reindeer or candy 
canes, just backlighted cutouts. We won 
first prize in the decoration contest. 
We also stopped traffic.

I still have the (very dusty) certificate
down next to the main control box.
And keep in mind that we were in 
competition with everyone else, not some 
"religious" (a.k.a. "not-as-good") 
division. The competition included the 
one where, near as I could tell, the 
blo-glo Wise Men were coming with 
Rudolph to take candy canes to Frosty 
the Snowman. I think, um, "eclectic"
is the word I'm looking for -- or 
"garish". I don't know how many thousand
lights they had, but they spelled out
"Merry Christmas" on the roof. You needed
sunglasses. It was great!

The next year we repaired the control 
box enough to be partly functional
again (including construction of 
all-new interface cards) to the point 
where we could program the light 
display. We built the "tree" in our 
front yard, using my new table saw
and lumber rescued from a patio 
cover that was teetering dangerously. 

We got 100 strings of Christmas 
lights on sale after Christmas in 
1998 for about 88 cents a string.
The unfortunate part was that the 
strings were multicolor (except for 
the white ones). We spent time that 
year pulling out the bulbs and 
reassembling single-color strings. 
By July, we had slapped together
a prototype in the back yard, and 
the neighbors got all excited about
how beautiful it was in just white
lights, and then I built the top
cone of the tree with six colors 
and connected it to the controls 
and they went nuts -- only a foot
and a half of the tree and, had I
not finished it by Christmas, I 
would have had to leave town.

The "tree" was twelve feet tall with 
sixteen "blocks" of lights. Each block 
contained six strings of lights, each 
in a different color. In addition to 
the "tree" and our own bushes, we 
"borrowed" three bushes from the 
neighbors and ran extension cords over 
there. 

We later moved the location of the tree 
so that it could be anchored to the 
carport, and we enlarged it to sixteen 
feet tall. You can still see the 
patched-on part of the very top "block" 
(named Horus -- that's another story)
that is conical in shape. "Horus" is the 
white part in the photo at the right and 
up a bit.

We missed the year 2001 because we were
in a state of uncertainty. Rich's mom
passed away in October, and we felt that
God was leading us elsewhere, which He
did.

Christmas 2002 found us in Winona Lake,
Indiana. We put up the display during
Thanksgiving break as we usually did,
and nearly froze to death. We now put up
the main structure at Hallowe'en and let
the neighbors wonder. (Not really, they
actually help out!)

The present "tree" is anchored to the 
side of the house where it is protected
from the wind. The control room is 
inside the three windows to the left of
the tree. We decorate the bushes along
the driveway and they also dance to the
music. This year, we also have electric
snowflakes up in the trees, individually
controlled, and Bethlehem and the manger
scene from 1998 are back; we just have
to figure out where to put them. The 
star on top is outlined in rope lights
and its interior is twinkle lights
(used to be another rope light). 
There are six streamers of chase lights 
emanating from the star along the eaves
and down the tree.

The tree itself has 96 strings of 
lights arranged in 16 blocks of six
colors each. Each string of lights is
individually switched to make changing
patterns that interpret the music. Each
song is programmed individually to make
the 8100 lights (plus bushes, etc.)
interpret the music, strictly controlled
by a tick track timed in milliseconds.

Doesn't sound like much to the folks 
with 50,000 or 100,000 lights, but we 
had 500 cars last year, plus some church
and nursing-home buses. Kathy passes out 
cookies and a leaflet telling about the 
"tree" and the Reason for the Season. 
Went through 130 dozen cookies and plan 
for 170 dozen this year. We still have 
no Santas or Frostys, even though the 
12 1/2-foot-tall inflatable Frostys
were on sale for $5.00 apiece last 
January. We'll let others put up those
things and we'll take care of the Real
Stuff. 

<flame>
It just burns me up when
some pointy-headed city council forbids 
any "religious" displays and then allows 
Chanukah and Kwanzaa displays -- and 
usually pagan Winter Solstice and Wiccan 
-- on the courthouse lawn, and the idiot
school principals (where do they get
taught this junk?) who forbid students to
write an essay about the true meaning of
Christmas, much less sing anything 
"religious" at their "winter festival". 
Aaaarrrggghhh!
Sic 'em, Rudolph! Kill! Break free of your
puppet masters!
</flame>

Next year, animated camels for the
Wise Men?...

Yeah, and four Wise Men at that, 
just to be ornery. Where does it say 
three? Huh? Show me, chapter and verse!

Software and Hardware
We "graduated" from DOS (legacy from
1987) to Red Hat 9. Why? Because BSD
doesn't have easy control of the output
ports and Windows is downright anal 
about it. Not knowing how to write
XP drivers or Media Player (WiMP?) 
plugins, I went over to the UNIX side.
I was worrying about how to get the 
program to read the tick track and
start the music simultaneously with
the program. NO PROBLEM! Just write
a shell script that starts the MP3 
player and  then the light-control 
program and go take a coffee break!

I wrote the light-control language and
compiler while taking a course in
compiler construction at Virginia Tech
in 1988. Version 1.x produced code that
was compiled by Turbo Pascal. This was
fine, more or less, until things became
very complex. So I rewrote the compiler
and changed the language for better
control of single elements (stars,
bushes, snowflakes) as well as producing
C code for further compilation by gcc. 
After a bit of tweaking, I guess you 
would say it's about at "Release 2.1". 
That one has been stable for 3 seasons 
now. The tree is sort of fixed at 16
sections x 6 colors (96 triacs) and all
you gotta do is map which light (bush,
star, whatever) goes to which outlet
and just call 'em by name. (On Dasher,
on Dancer, off Rudolph.... Sorry, bad
joke.)

The media player with Red Hat 9 won't 
play MP3 files, so I downloaded the XMMS
player from Red Hat 7 and it's perfect.
(Something about patents and threats of
lawsuits -- I have only a foggy idea.)

I built a radio transmitter in 1999 and,
rather than annoy the whole neighborhood
with loud music, we have a sign telling
people to tune their car radios to 89.9.
The output from the sound card goes
directly into the transmitter. The 
six-foot antenna is mounted vertically
for better reception by car antennas.

We're hoping for even more people to 
come this year, and we pray that hearts
will be changed permanently.

Updates

2006

Well, this is the year we bit the 
bullet and added 32 more circuits. We
built a dozen little trees (ran out of 
time & lumber), five of which have six 
colors each as the fifth "row" of the
big tree. Seven of them are green and
white, scattered down the driveway to
the sign, which is now residing on the
opposite side from last year. On the
fence side, we have six white spiral
trees that were on sale last January,
and we have about 70 feet of sale-priced
icicle lights around the house.

Had to sit down for a couple of 
(wire) wrap sessions to add four more
chips to the board. Also had to build
another transistor card. Believe it or
don't, everything worked when I got done.

The manger scene is fastened to the
neighbors' garage, and Bethlehem is
fastened to the new fence they built
by the garage, all facing the parking
lot. The menorah (for Chanukah) is 
bolted to the end of our fence. Don't
see too many menorahs in the Midwest,
and even fewer that have one more 
light each night of Chanukah. We 
figure that the recovery of the Temple
from the pagans was significant to
Christians; betcha that Jesus also
celebrated Chanukah; it is recorded
that he kept several of the other
feast days.

So I got to build a bunch more 
circuits and rebuild a few more of
the 110-volt-switching boards. Got
750 feet of #16 six-conductor cable
on eBay, built some really long
cables for the opposite side of the
driveway. Looks a lot better than
the 2 dozen bright orange extension
cords. Longest one is 180 feet. Old
cables had #18 conductors and worked 
fine up to about 75 feet.

Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. Built a new
four-pointed star. Looks more like a
cross, which pleases me, and I bought
some aluminum strips and made an 
eight-pointed "starburst" with chase
lights. Last year I bought these
little black "caps" for the mini-light
bulbs. Used them to cover the chase
lights going toward the center of the
star; hence, all you see is radiating
outward from the center. (Bad joke:
now we have "black lights" as the
seventh color on our tree....) It 
weighs less than half of the five-
pointed star (which now hangs on
the front porch) and is therefore
much easier to handle while standing
on the ladder.

And then there's more construction
across the street. They covered up
the trench where they laid a new
water main, but at night, the 
visitors can't see where the
driveway is because all of the
grass is gone. So I made an "ENTER"
sign, rigged up a battery holder
out of a piece of PVC conduit,
and put directional LEDs blinking
across the top of it. Printed the
11x17 sign on the inkjet printer,
laminated it with clear contact
paper. Had the chips and stuff
left over from last year's tree,
just had to rearrange it a bit.