There are Christmas light displays, and then there is Nick Triantafillou's house.
The IT technician from Wollongong has custom-built a display in the style of Vivid — Sydney's festival of light — rather than Clark Griswald's garish effort in National Lampoons Christmas Vacation.
Featuring about 65,000 LED lights and a soundtrack, Mr Triantafillou's display comes with the added bonus that you can control what you see and hear.
"There are currently 25 different songs and I'm always adding to them.
"There is a Michael Jackson medley, a Queen medley, more recent artists like Sia, The Kid Laroi and Justin Beiber, so there's lots to pick from."
People can also select Christmas favourites like Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You, Let It Snow, and It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas.
Display brings traffic to standstill
Each song is played out of two speakers on his property or on a local FM radio frequency.
The songs have a coordinated light display which he has either purchased, sourced, or created himself.
"The night we launched the display traffic came to a standstill," he said.
"We had cars in a line waiting to get a look and people who had parked around the corner who had got out to have a closer look.
"It gets pretty busy. We clog up the street."
He said his neighbours are supportive of the display and he has programmed the volume to drop as the night progresses.
Marathon build during COVID lockdown
The IT technician has spent half the year building the display, all the while ordering new parts and building the configuration to suit his house.
"It's just fun and it's the perfect intersection of my love for technology and building stuff," he said.
"It started with wanting my mega tree, which is 5,000 pixels, and then seeing what goes along with that. So we added small Christmas trees, snowflakes, and everything else."
The mega tree is four metres high and contains 32 strands of plastic, housing 150 bulbs each.
He said it took him about an hour to do each strand, meaning the tree alone took 32 hours to build.
He said the effort is worth it to see the joy it brings people of all ages.
"It's awesome and it's great to see the result of what took so long to build," he said.
"I remember after I finished building it I just sat across the road for about 15 minutes watching all the music, lights, and sequences myself.
"I was just taking it in because it was a lot of work. But it turned out exactly how I wanted so I'm pretty happy with it."
