About All Seasons

My wife has always affectionately referred to me as the “Clark Griswald” of our neighborhood.  Growing up, my family always pulled out the stops when we decorated for Christmas.

Thus, when my wife and I bought our first home, I looked forward to carrying on this tradition with my new family.  Our first house, a nice 3-bedroom story-and-a-half, was easy to do.  My dad and I worked together to hang the lights.  And while we gave my wife a fright as I walked around on the rooftop, we managed to avoid any serious injuries and the house looked great!

About 8 years later, we bought a new house.  This was a 4-bedroom, 2-story.  I had been envisioning the Christmas lights for several months, so when Christmas rolled around, I was ready to go!  Since I had to buy all new lights, I went with multi-colored rope lights.  Obviously, the lights from the old house–white flashing icicles–would not fit the new house. I eyeball-measured how many feet of lights I would need, and off I went to the hardware store to make my purchase.

The Turning Point
I took the day off of work and began laying down the track, which took me most of the day.  By early afternoon, I was ready to start laying down the lights.  This is when disaster struck.  The lights I had bought did not fit the tracking that I had just laid down!  I could not believe this!  I was absolutely dumbfounded!

I stormed back up to the hardware store and asked them why they had these rope lights placed next to this tracking, thus implying that they went together, when they did not. They ended up giving me my money back, but this did not replace the loss of my time, nor did it do anything to lift my spirits back up. By this time, I was too disheartened to even try again. I did not venture back onto the roof that year.

An Idea Is Born
After all of this hassle, an idea began forming in my mind.  Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if there was some way to test my lighting designs before going to all the trouble of climbing up ladders and onto roofs only to find out that my design did not work or just looked bad?  And once the design was right, wouldn’t it be nice if I could generate a shopping list that told me exactly what I needed and how much of it I needed?

Having had some experience using home-design software, I thought something like that would translate easily to my idea. Thus, I began developing an easy-to-use online tool that will aid other Griswald wannabes in their quest to design a beautiful outdoor holiday home display.

I hope the use of my All Season’s Holiday Lighting Software will help bring more joy, and less stress, to your holiday seasons.