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About LightUpCitrus

 

We are one of citrus counties most highly decorated holiday homes.

If you like to read, Here is the story of our history....

 

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Our holiday displays bring joy and happiness to all ages. We spend several months of the off season programming our holiday light shows in order to sync our lights to the music. We have both older Christmas & Halloween songs  as well as newer genre songs that are all programmed to dance with the lights. Our shows motto is go bigger! The display is a free event that we put on for our community. It all started off as a small show of static lights way back in the early 1990's when I was a teenager. A neighborhood competition that created a life long journey for me. A few strands of lights and I was hooked!

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 My love of holiday lights became an addiction. When I was just a child of 7 or 8 years old, there was a house just off I-95 in South Florida that went all out. It was actually several houses. Seeing the lights and all the people who came to see them intrigued me. From there it was all things holiday for me from that point forward. I was inspired by a legend. Back when I was younger, I would often wonder how awesome it would be to sync my lights to music. Even back in the 90's I was dreaming of that happening one day. Over the years life happened and I ended up postponing my holiday lights. Then back in 2008-2009, I had watched videos on myspace of a couple Halloween and Christmas light shows on peoples houses and thought how cool was that it was finally happening with people being able to sync the lights to music. I just wasn't at the point in life to be able to take on that task at the time.

 

Over the years, the display has grown into what it is now.

We started again in this area in 2010 with a few strands of lights. Then we began the upgrade to led lights back in 2012. We have poured thousands of dollars into our display all in the hopes of spreading holiday cheer to others. Back then our display was just a static show and was located in Spring Hill, Florida. One year we started using a Mr Christmas lights and sound controller. It gave us 4 channels of blinking lights to music. It was nowhere near the level that I wanted since I could not control everything individually. So I started researching Lightorama. I had a goal of one day investing in total control of the display.

 

 After moving the display to Citrus county, we found it to be more popular than ever before.

So In 2016 I finally ventured into the world of computerized Christmas displays with Lightorama. We launched our computerized show with the help of two of the lightorama forum greats who helped me learn how to program and answered all my questions. To this day, I am still in touch with both James and JR. They truly helped me get this display to where it is now.  All it took was our 2016 light show and it became successful practically overnight. The only downfall was that in 2018 it had become a bit too popular in The Meadows community of Homosassa, Florida.  We had some problems with the now former HOA over traffic. Mind you my kids were well known in the community for helping cut yards. We helped the elderly and we did everything so many others refused to do. Out of nowhere a Grinch took issue with people parking in a grassy common area across from our display and we only had maybe 30 cars total a night on weekends which is what started the whole fiasco.

(They would hate us now, we are over 100 vehicles a night on weekends)

 

In all honesty, It was a bitter battle that was best won by simply moving on and leaving the HOA behind. They were all voted out or quit after our display moved out of the community. The backlash from residents proved to be too much them.  Well back to the main story. We were only renters at the time, and our landlord decided to tell us he was going to sell the place. He never did of coarse. He took the rent up on the next tenants 400 more a month! But that's a different story. Upon hearing he was going to sell the house, we reached out to our displays facebook fan page with a plea for help to find a rental. We had no idea what was about to happen...

 

That post changed our lives! Its crazy to think we were sent our guardian angels who have now become our friend family. Who would have thought that a simple visitor to our show would bless us as we had blessed others. They offered their home to us to rent. Little did we know only a few months into renting they gave us the best Christmas Gift EVER! They brought over a contract for us to buy the house! We were speechless and in shock. Words weren't there but tears sure were. So today where we are located in Kensington Estates is now our permanent display home.

An acre of yard to do as we please and most importantly, no overzealous HOA members telling us what we can or can't do with our show or property. (No offense to those who are in HOA's.)

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This was kind of hard to accept because for years it was always us doing for others and never getting any help in the process. It was always about doing onto others. Then along came these two that totally changed everything for us and the future of our display. Jen & Mike were without a doubt sent to us by a higher power. They took a chance on total strangers based on them just coming out to our light show just one year prior. We are forever in their debt and will always base our show on giving back to others and for our community just as they did for us. From here on out, our show is dedicated to them and the miracle they provided us when we had lost hope. It was a Christmas miracle in July!

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In 2020 I was diagnosed with cancer. In 2021 I had surgery. It really did a number to me and I realized I can not continue with such a large display.  In 2021 our display had over 50,000 led lights. The work became too much while going through my cancer journey. So we made the decision and sold off all of the led strings lights and reinvested that money from the sale into RGB smart pixels.

So for 2022 Our display is now all rgb pixel based.  It is a major change to the display but it has allowed me to continue with much less labor involved. I look forward to continuing to decorate on a slightly smaller scale.

 

So that is our displays history lesson. I may hide off in the shadows and rarely greet visitors but know I have and always will do this to give something back to others. Moral of the story is that our display "LightUpCitrus" is here to stay in Kensington Estates until I simply can not do it anymore.

Never lose faith and keep in mind god does hear your prayers.

It's on his time and when the time is right.... BAM!

Your dreams can come true...

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Merry Christmas everyone...

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If you ever need to contact us or have questions,

Please send us a facebook message.

facebook.com/LightUpCitrus