Holiday Light Fest

Regardless of where you live in the world you are likely familiar with the tradition of stringing holiday lights around one’s home to make the season a bit brighter. 

A few strands of icicle lights is one thing, but what about those die-hard holiday decorators who spend days, weeks, even months festooning their houses and yards with millions of colored lights, plywood holiday characters, and massive blow-up Christmas trees, Santas, Rudolphs and snowmen? 

While you might not be motivated to make your home a beacon of Christmas lights for Santa, there are hundreds of homeowners who make lightfests an annual tradition.  And this year you can locate those homes much quicker thanks to the website TackyLightTour.com.  The site is an online community for people who pull out all the stops when it comes to holiday lights. 

The creator of the website says he got the idea for the site when he found himself spending hours planning the annual family car trip to the best Christmas lights in Richmond, Virginia.  The process involved plotting addresses from his local newspaper on maps, then determining the best route to take throughout the city.  Tiring of all the work Matt Burgess came up with a better way using free online mapping services.

Burgess tinkered with his idea for years and finally got his site up and running.  These days he says he gets requests from tacky people around the world to display their light shows on his site.

To enter your home on the site your property must be rigged with more than 10,000 Christmas lights.  The requirement may sound steep, but Burgess says he has homes from Green Bay to Galveston on “Tacky Tours.” What’s more, Burgess’s hometown of Richmond is probably the best -known Christmas-light display destination in the country.  On any given night in December, traffic jams form around certain neighborhoods as dozens of vans, limousines and tour buses take their Tacky Light Tour.

See Also:

Holiday Traditions
Holiday Story time