Neon style RGB Christmas Light sign

I am typically a reluctant participant in the xLights Around the World Project during Christmas. We don't even use xLights to program our Christmas lights. We are devotees of the program Vixen. But one of the main organizers of the project is a friend and I like the idea of so many people in the Christmas light community coming together to work on the project. This year the project selected the song "Sounding Joy" by Ellie Holcomb and I really liked the song and the music video. I also liked the theme of "Joy" that reminded me of one of my favorite conference talks from October 2024: Welcome to the Church of Joy given by Patrick Kearon. I decided a big neon style sign that said "JOY" would be a good addition to the lights on the house.

A few years ago Costco actually sold a neon flex light and when they put them on discount after Christmas I was able to buy four of them for what I remember being $20 each. The lights are 24 volt and have connectors that are identical to the xConnect or Holidaycoro style light connectors most of our lights use.

Someone claimed the lights could be controlled with WS2811 light controllers. This was going to be my chance to try that out. The lights had 50 segments of groups of 3 lights. The box claimed you could connect multiple strands together. I needed 2 strands for a total of 32 feet to create the JOY sign. The lights did indeed work with most of the controllers I tested them out with. I tried them with an Advatek PixLite 4, a Falcon PiCap, and with a Genius Controller. None of the controllers worked when I tried connecting the two strands together for a total of 100 segments / 300 lights. The lights would generally act glitchy. When I connected each strand directly to a controller output so there were just 50 segments / 150 lights they worked okay. I used the Genius Controller because it was the most stable. I have a feeling that while most of these controller claim they work with 24 volt lights they just don't have many people ever using 24 volt and therefore they don't work quite right. Also I can't be sure if the lights from Costco are actually standard WS2811 lights.

I connected the lights together and then used blue painters tape to shape the letters out on the kitchen floor.

I used these threaded metal rods from Home Depot to form a rigid structure for the letters and zip-tied the lights to the rods. I was able to easily bend the rod with my hands.

After getting the lights fully connected to the rods it was time to see if it would be rigid enough to stay in shape on the house. Fletch and I rigged up three hooks on the house as pulleys and used some string to hoist the sign into position. This actually worked way better than we were expecting. The sign easily went into position. Then we used steel wire to run from the J the O the Y up to the hooks.

At this point we realized the J looked more like a G and the O looked a bit like an A. We had created a sign that said GAY instead of JOY. I climbed the ladder and bent the cursive letters a bit to try to get JOY.

I thought the sign looked great. It looked pretty much exactly how I pictured it would look. No one else in the family seemed to enjoy it though. Eddie commented that "Next year there will be no joy. The sign or otherwise."

So the "Joy" sign was a one year only design. I hope you enjoyed it. You won't get a chance to see it again on the house. But maybe you will get to see it somewhere else next year...

Here is the Joy sign and a recording of the "Sounding Joy" song for xLights Around the World.

And finally here is the xLights Around the World video. Hammond Lights is featured at 8:57 on the xLights video (and you can't even see the Joy sign during the part where we are shown!).