Greeley Griswald Light Show

The Greeley Griswald Light Show is an annual christmas light show created by the Grizwald family in Greeley, Colorado. They have been decorating their house since 1999, and it has grown a little bit each year!
Technical Information
Displays at the Greeley Grizwald Light Show are controlled by computers and wires. And the lights, (also computerized) are synchronized to christmas music on the radio. The music is broadcasted over a low power FM radio transmitter, broadcasting to car radios on 92.9 FM. 320 computer controlled light channels are used in the display. The chistmas light show display has over 135,000 lights on average. There are over 400 amps for the Christmas display alone. The Electric Bill, the Grizwalds don't like to talk about much (it's their gift to the community, and you don't talk about the price of a gift). Setup time is several weeks (design and project devolvement most of the year). Storage for all of the lights, wires, and other decorations are kept in multiple areas. 26 separate red, green, and clear sections of lights also cover the roof.
The Greeley Grizwalds
History of Lights
The first known electric Christmas lights was created by Edward H. Johnson, an associate of inventor Thomas Edison. While he was vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company, a predecessor of today's Con Edison electric utility, he had Christmas light bulbs especially made for him. He proudly displayed his Christmas tree with the bulbs on it, which was hand-wired with 80 red, white and blue electric light bulbs the size of walnuts, on December 22, 1882 at his home on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Local newspapers ignored the story, seeing it as a publicity stunt. However, it was published by a Detroit newspaper reporter, and Johnson has become widely known as the Father of Electric Christmas Lights. By 1900, businesses started stringing up Christmas lights behind their windows. Christmas lights were too expensive for the average person; as such, electric Christmas lights did not become the majority replacement for candles until 1930. In 1895, U.S. President Grover Cleveland proudly sponsored the first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White House. It was a huge specimen, featuring more than a hundred multicolored lights. The first commercially produced Christmas tree lamps were manufactured in strings of multiples of eight sockets by the General Electric Co. of Harrison, New Jersey. Each socket took a miniature two-candela carbon-filament lamp. From that point on, electrically illuminated Christmas trees, but only indoors, grew with mounting enthusiasm in the United States and elsewhere. San Diego in 1904 and Appleton, WI in 1909, and New York City in 1912 were the first recorded instances of the use of Christmas lights outside. McAdenville North Carolina claims to have been the first in 1956. The Library of Congress credits the town for inventing "the tradition of decorating evergreen trees with Christmas lights dates back to 1956 when the McAdenville Men's Club conceived of the idea of decorating a few trees around the McAdenville Community Center." However, the tree at Rockefeller Center has had "lights" since 1931, but did not have real electric lights until 1956. Furthermore, Philadelphia's Christmas Light Show and Disney's Christmas Tree also began in 1956. Though General Electric sponsored community lighting competitions during the 1920s, it would take until the mid 1950s for the use of such lights to be adopted by average households. Over a period of time, strings of Christmas lights found their way into use in places other than just Christmas trees. Soon, strings of lights adorned mantles and doorways inside homes, and ran along the rafters, roof lines, and porch railings of homes and businesses. In recent times, many city skyscrapers are decorated with long mostly-vertical strings of a common theme, and are activated simultaneously in Grand Illumination ceremonies.
In the mid 2000s, the video of the home of Carson Williams was widely distributed on the internet as a viral video. It garnered national attention in 2005 from The Today Show on NBC, Inside Edition and the CBS Evening News and was featured in a Miller television commercial. Williams turned his hobby into a commercial venture, and was commissioned to scale up his vision to a scale of 250,000 lights at a Denver shopping center, as well as displays in parks and zoos. The Greeley Grizwald family used christmas light in a wonderful way, to amaze people, to bring joy, and have fun setting up the lights and decorations! Christmas lights have gone a long ways.

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