In Search Of…Extreme Holiday Lights
One La Crosse house goes above and beyond to put on a show!
LA CROSSE, Wis. — Everywhere you look these days you will find holiday lights twinkling from above. Some displays are big. Some more modest. But rarely are they quite like this.
“Merry Christmas from the Knudsen’s. Hope you enjoy the show. Now where is that switch???”
La Crosse firefighter Tim Knudsen has been hanging holiday lights ever since he moved here 14 years ago.
“It’s just kind of evolved and gotten bigger and bigger every year.”
But three years ago he was inspired. “There was a beer commercial that had them animated and then you started finding more and more people were doing it.”
So, months before the Holiday season, the planning begins. “This is kind of an above view of my house. This is my roof line and this is the star on my addition.”
Armed with a special computer program, Tim spends hours perfectly choreographing this years performance. “I’ll have about 30 hours into this song getting it to do what I want it to do. You have to be able to see what you have in your head and know what it’s going to look like when you’re standing out looking at it.”
“This is my new…I call it a fire stick. It’s going to go up the center of my mega tree and it’s going to go whew!”
Every part of this display is designed and built by Tim. The 30 foot mega tree. “I made the star. It’s a rod that I’ve bent and welded.” He even built his own nativity scene.
And perhaps the biggest challenge of all, tackling the virtual maze of lights and extension cords. “I’m over 30,000 actual lights.”
To top it all off, he has his own radio frequency to broadcast the music. “You can get it just around each corner and it doesn’t transmit any farther.”
So much work, which makes the unveiling so much better. “You can hear them when they are out with their windows down saying, oh, oh that’s cool. They enjoy it and that’s all that really matters.”
If you’d like to see the house for yourself, the address is 2830 Robin Hood Drive in La Crosse. All they ask is that you drive carefully and are respectful when you stop by.
