Corrugated Christmas

Chad Boak from Vaughn Forest Church in Montgomery, AL brings us this fun Christmas stage design.

From Chad: Every year, Vaughn Forest Church comes up with a beautiful and intentional Christmas set that sets the mood for worship throughout the month.

This year’s set is simple, beautiful, warm, and maybe even a bit nostalgic. The thought was this: with all the distance in the world, both physical and emotional people should feel welcomed and warm in the church. This set creates the feeling of closeness while still maintaining 6 feet of distance between instrumentalist and singers. The bonus is that it’s not too difficult to make!

This set consists of a wooden frame, corrugated tin, incandescent C9 Christmas lights, artificial Christmas trees, and polyfill batting for snow. It’s as simple as that.

The first thing you’ll want to do is build your wooden frame to attach your tin siding to. As you can see in the picture below, the frame is simple with braces to make it stand up. This frame is easy to change to fit the dimensions that are appropriate for your stage.

Once you’ve got your frame built you can attach your sheets of corrugated tin to it. We used 12 ft by 2 ft and 8 ft by 2 ft sheets. You’ll then want to drape your C9 incandescent strings of lights over the top of your frame with them hanging all the way down to the floor. We hung our strings 2 feet apart from each other. The corrugated tin disperses the light and makes it look like more lighting than it really is. Plus, it produces a beautiful warm glow.

From there, you just have to set up your Christmas Trees. We used a mixture of 7.5 ft and 10 ft trees. We chose to go with simple white light trees to keep the aesthetic simple and warm, but you can choose to decorate your trees however works best for you. Once the trees are put together and in their appropriate places, the final touch is to take the polyfill and create snow mounds under the trees.

Vaughn Forest volunteers are the true heroes of this set design as they always are. We have incredible people who work hard to make these beautiful sets a reality. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be able to do all we do. It’s thanks to our volunteers that this set went up in record time and only took an afternoon to get all in place.

This set is simple to make and can go up in just an afternoon with some great volunteers! It’s also easily adaptable for all kinds of spaces. No matter how big your stage is or how tall your ceilings, you can recreate this set design to fit perfectly within your space. Even though it’s simple it still makes a huge impact and creates the perfect atmosphere for our Christmas worship services.

If you decide to try it out, we’d love to see how it looks in your worship center!