Season's greetings and welcome to Part I of our 2024 look at the Christmas Houses of the South Okanagan.
Astute readers will note that this feature has, for the past six years, been called the Christmas Houses of Penticton. Why'd we switch? Because there's simply too much cool stuff going on outside city limits.
Stuff like "Lake City Lights" at 103 Devon Drive, on the northern tip of Okanagan Falls.
This is the home of Pen High teacher and basketball coach Josh Heinrich, wife Jackie (also a teacher, at Uplands Elementary) and kids Bree and Reid.
It's also home to one of the most stunning Christmas light shows in the region and likely in the interior of the province.
It's unique too. Rather than traditional outdoor Christmas lights, the Heinrichs have jumped on the emerging trend of "pixel lights."
The flashy, futuristic technology involves small, individually programmable LEDs, each capable of switching on and off and becoming virtually any colour at any time.
If you gather enough pixel lights together (we're talking thousands or if you really want to impress, tens of thousands) and position them in organized patterns, then program them to do your bidding, the impact is straight-up awesome.
How awesome? Head to YouTube and search for "Tom BetGeorge." He's one of the world's foremost practitioners.
However, the road to pixel light nirvana is a bumpy one. Though anyone can get in the game by buying a string of pixel lights from manufacturers like Govee, today's whole-house pixel light masterpieces are far more sophisticated. And far more complex.
Only the truly obsessed/committed need apply. Like Josh Heinrich and family.
The Heinrichs get things going in September, setting out lights and props for their Halloween show. The Christmas changeover happens in early November, and work continues through to the new year.
The head of the decorative committee is dad Josh, an intriguing guy who enjoys hard rock and metal, wears a Billy Gibbons-length beard, hits the gym like a maniac and teaches bball, and also believes strongly in a higher power and helping out any chance he gets at Penticton's Bethel Church.
"My wife and I dress up as human advent calendars throughout December," he told us straight-faced when we stopped by earlier this week. "We're both teachers, and we do it for school.
"We have different outfits for every day of the month. And the outfits get progressively more intense as we get closer. Like, there'll be things hanging in my beard.
"My wife started it."
And of course there's his fixation with turning his home into a pixel palace.
He's already dropped multiple thousands of dollars and multiple thousands of hours into the project, many of those being assisted by Jackie and the kids.
Currently, there are 22,000 pixels in his display.
"Pixel lights changed everything for me," he said. "My inspiration is a guy in Kelowna. He calls his display 'Lights on Fitzpatrick.' He doesn’t have a lot of props, but he has a fantastic pixel light display that looks really clean.
"We first learned about him four years ago, and we went there and sat outside his house for a long time, just looking at it."
Heinrich contacted the Lights on Fitzpatrick dude to learn more, who in turn asked Heinrich if he know what he was getting into. Then he sent him a 300-page online document.
"He's since become my mentor," said Heinrich, who read every word of that document. "But it really is ridiculously complex. And it's ridiculously technical. You have to put everything together piecemeal.
"The learning curve is tough, and the pixel Facebook groups are littered with people selling their displays because they didn’t have the time or the will to fully commit."
Heinrich took us inside to show us the hub of his display, a Mac desktop running an application called "xLights."
Billed as a "light sequencer and show scheduler," xLights allows Heinrich to program all 22,000 pixels to music – when they turn on, when they turn off, and when they change colour.
And that's the key to the entire thing – getting those dense, highly organized groupings of pixels to do their thing to music.
"It's a free online program that some smart person came up with," said Heinrich. "There aren’t a lot of alternatives. This is the one everyone uses, even the guys all over YouTube."
The interface is reminiscent of modern audio and video recording software where instrument recordings are dragged and dropped across a timeline.
"I buy these sequences (a sequence is a series of effects for a given song) from people who've created them," said Heinrich. "So you buy all the effects that go with a song, and then you spend time customizing them to your own display.
"You basically sit there with the headphones and listen over and over again, making adjustments to parts of your display. I listened to Alvin and the Chipmunks 40 times in one evening."
Currently, Heinrich's show features 55 songs in all. As a bonus, visitors to the property can choose the song they'd like to hear over the outdoor speakers.
Continuing the behind the scenes tour, Heinrich took us back outside where he showed us one of the four "main control boxes" he's positioned throughout the front yard. It is, as the image shows, packed with cables and components, all assembled on site DIY-style.
"Here there are 12-volt power supplies powering little computer boards which then have little extensions to all of the lights," said Heinrich. "This also then talks to a bunch of smaller peripheral controllers. I've probably got 12 or 15 of them as well hidden throughout the yard as well.
Why all those controllers? Because, says Heinrich, wires can only be a certain length (20 to 25 feet) before they start losing data.
As for all those pixels, each of which contains red, green and blue LEDs and a data line so it can receive individual instruction, Heinrich believes it's the density and the highly organized, down-to-the-centimeter arrangements that make them so special.
"You'd never see thousands of regular Christmas lights, so evenly and so densely spaced, moving like this," he said.
And it all takes time.
"The pixels (which he sources directly from a Chinese factory) come in strands," he explained. "They're all the same.
"And then you buy plastic props. And then you push all the lights into the plastic props to create all the patterns, shapes and characters you see here. And that's hard to do. You use big leather gloves and you push really, really hard.
"I did that 22,000 times."
At the end of the season, the family assembles to disassemble. Pulling everything down takes four to five days. Drying it takes weeks. Putting it away adds even more time.
"Everything comes apart," said Heinrich. "The strips I store in garbage cans. There are 24 strips at 75 lights per strip on that Christmas tree (to the right of the driveway) alone.
"But many of lights are attached to PVC so they can’t be rolled up."
There is, however, one element in the Heinrich display that's distinctly old school – a stylized mail box that's actually a donation box. This year, they’re collecting bucks for BC Children's Hospital.
One of the flashiest displays in the entire Okanagan, Lake City Lights at 103 Devon Drive in OK Falls is active right through Jan. 5.
