Christmas Net

Ryan Bailey from Mountain View Community Church in Frederick, MD brings us this awesome Christmas light setup.

They change their Christmas stage design every couple of years, typically building off the ideas they liked the most from the previous design, and then figuring out how to take it somewhere new. For this year, they built off of the trees used in their previous design (Stars in Stars from Dec 2019). They got rid of the wooden crates and candles from the previous design and replaced them with 6 more of the pre-lit Amazon birch trees in various sizes. They had been their favorite aspect of the previous design, giving a very organic feel to the whole stage area.

Their “curtain” of Edison lights had gradually begun to fail over the years, so they removed it several months ago, but wanted to bring some additional light back into the design. Because they’re always trying to break down the barrier between the people on stage and the rest of the room, they decided to hang string lights from their rearmost lighting truss to the truss in the middle of the room. They felt like this would help create more of a sense of “togetherness” in the room. They found some LED lights on Amazon that were 1000 lights per strand and remote controlled. This allowed them to plug the lights into the power outlets on the trusses and turn them on each weekend with a remote. They started from the middle of the front lighting truss and strung them to the rear truss, then crossing them over.

All in all, they spent around $500 on the new trees and lights (plus the cost of a lift to reach the lighting trusses), and the rest of the trees, etc. were reused from their previous design.