It's About Time!
Welcome to your October 2007 edition of the
PlanetChristmas newsletter! It is published regularly and covers
relative topics for the Christmas decorating enthusiast.
Here's what you can read about in this October 2007 newsletter:
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Time to start rolling out your 2007 display!
What a wonderful time of year. The stores are putting the
Christmas decorations on the shelves and we can get a peek at what they
will be really pushing.
It looks like a simple string of 100 mini-lights will be around $2.00
(USD). If you really think about Christmas lights, they are
nothing but a bunch of copper wire with a few bulbs attached. Even
with the price of copper constantly climbing, mini-light prices are
roughly the same as 2006. Many stores are using this low price to
get you through their doors so you'll be tempted to buy the expensive
stuff. Show restraint!
LED
based Christmas strings are getting brighter and cheaper but you still
pay a premium to "be green" and save a lot of power. I did see at
Wal-Mart the price difference on a 25 light string of C7's,
incandescents vs. LEDs, was only $1.00. A big step in the right
direction.
If you are faced with the problem of not having enough power to
light everything you want, switching to LEDs might be the way to go
since they use only about 20% of the power of classic Christmas lights.
To put it in perspective, you can buy a lot of LED strings when compared
to having a licensed electrician upgrade your electrical service.
If you need to buy a lot of lights this year, do it now. The
selection is excellent and you can get plenty of what you need.
With the merchants pushing Christmas sooner this year (my mall Santa is
arriving November 8th), don't take chances and wait for a sale or what
you want will be gone.
A few simple suggestions before you start hanging those lights:
- Draw a picture of where you're going to put everything. A
little time invested in planning the display while sitting at the
kitchen table can prevent headaches later. You can still tweak
your design when outside in the heat of battle but all the big
decisions have been made.
- Look at the calendar now. Thanksgiving is earlier than
normal this year (were the stores behind this, somehow???) and since
you have already made a basic plan at the kitchen table, you can
figure what small projects need to be done and by when. Factor
in now it IS going to rain so have some days planned in advance for
inside activity.
- Test the Christmas lights now. It's a lot easier to fix a
bad string when standing on the ground compared to swinging from a
ladder.
- Label everything! Carry a roll of masking tape and a
Sharpie with you at all times. At the end of every wire, flag
it with a piece of tape and mark what it is. This will save
you an incredible amount of time when connecting everything together
or troubleshooting a problem. At the end of the season, the
masking tape easily tears off.
- And finally: don't turn on the display for the public
until you are ready! People will see you working and beg to
get a sneak peek. Don't cave to the pressure. You're
creating something that will make lifelong memories in your
community so make sure you're satisfied before you tell the world!
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Looking for an easy to deploy FM radio station for this year?
Check out a plug-and-play one at
http://www.wholehousefmtransmitter.com/ It has a range of about 150
feet and is perfect to send your music to the cars driving in front of
the house.
If you're thinking about trying to computerize the Christmas lights
this year, but want to use just a very tiny amount of money and lights,
General Electric has come out with the gizmo called "Lights and Sounds
of Christmas" that flashes six channels of Christmas lights to music
being played through a built-in speaker. Pretty slick and has a
list price of $129. It's not expandable and the music is MIDI
based, but it's a way to be different from your neighbors. Get
more details at Christmas Light Show, one of our PlanetChristmas vendors
with a weblink of
http://www.christmaslightshow.com/xcart/product.php?productid=168&cat=21&bestseller
Christmas Done Bright has rolled out a "Rocket Santa" wireframe for
2007. Very original! Check it out at
http://www.christmasdonebright.com/lighted-displays/New-for-2007/ROCKET-SANTA
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The
official 2007 PlanetChristmas shirts have arrived as well as the yard
signs. See all the details at
http://www.planetchristmas.com/Merchandise.htm. Money
collected from these sales goes toward PlanetChristmas and PLUS.
I'm still traveling around visiting PlanetChristmas vendors... though
they are getting incredibly busy as the Christmas season kicks into high
gear. Everyone tells me they have to work seven days a week from
October 1st through December 15th to try and keep up with demand.
I'm so glad they are working those incredibly long hours to make
Christmas great for everyone else!
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Got a bunch of wireframes, blowmolds or plywood cutouts you want to
stand-up in your yard. The easiest thing is to use a piece of
rebar from the concrete section in your local home center. I have
various sizes from 2-6' in length and have spray painted them black so
they don't rust. Pound one or two of these in the ground and
anchor the wireframe to it using the green twist ties from your garden.
Works great. When the season is over, wiggle the rebar rod while
it's still in the ground and pull straight up. Now you've even
aerated your yard!
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Got any juicy bits of gossip you want to share with the
PlanetChristmas community? Send a tip to
csmith@PlanetChristmas.com
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Many of us have become very creative with our unique signature
automatically added to the end of each post we make in the
PlanetChristmas Forums (My Account/Edit Profile/Signature). You
can have pictures, links, colored text and just all kinds of cool
attention grabbers... but let's be careful. As we enter the busy
Christmas season, the bigger/flashier your signature, the more
irritating it becomes to others. Let's keep it simple and refrain
from blatant advertising. My PlanetChristmas Forums signature is
below as an example.
Chuck Smith
at http://www.PlanetChristmas.com
Don't forget our three
PlanetChristmas rules: [color=red][b]Positive, family friendly and
Christmas centric[/b][/color]
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The PlanetChristmas community has experienced tremendous growth.
Our three fundamental rules of family friendly, positive and Christmas
centric guide what we say and do. The real key to our community is
a willingness to exchange information so others can have better
displays. Come join us!
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Talking about a gold mine of information, this is the place! If
you haven't found it yet, go to
http://www.planetchristmas.com/talk.htm. We've recently added
more forums and made it a little easier to get around. Once you're
a member, feel free to change the look and feel of the forums by going
to "My Account/Preferences/Board Theme." Don't forget to update
your profile so others can learn about your display. Also remember
the part of the forums you can see when not logged in is indexed by the
Internet search engines, but once you're a registered member, many new
forums open up but are invisible to the search engines.
PlanetChristmas believes strongly in protecting your privacy.
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The PlanetChristmas radio station is still on-line and available to
anyone with a fast Internet connection to tap into. Thanks to
The Demented
Elf, PlanetChristmas Radio now has "a new sound" while not straying
from it's mission of Christmas music 24x7... even in the middle of
Autumn. How can you go wrong? Find the details at
http://www.planetchristmas.com/PCRadio2007.htm
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Have a suggestion for a main
topic or want to write an article for a future PlanetChristmas
newsletter? Send me an email: csmith@planetchristmas.com
If you know someone that really should subscribe to your newsletter,
send them to
http://planetchristmas.com/lists/?p=subscribe
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Next time: look forward to more Christmas
decorating tips.
Chuck Smith of
PlanetChristmas
