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Caine Woods Christmas House: Pixel Perfection
Mark and Jessica Jahnke are the owners of, and creative masterminds behind, the Caine Woods Christmas House in Ocean City, MD. Their pixel light show has become a year-round attraction, drawing visitors from all over who come to watch and listen to the incredible show. We sat down with Mark to find out more about this incredible project.
How did the “Caine Woods Christmas House” get its start?
Playing with animated holiday lighting synced to music has been something that I have always been interested in, however, I never started exploring it until COVID (2020) when we needed a good distraction! It started out with just doing permanent lights on the roofline so that we could celebrate the different holidays without having to put lights up and down, and then expanded from there. Next came the vertical lines on the house, then the windows, etc. From there, it grew to different lighted props for the various holidays. For Christmas, we added arches, candy canes, snowflakes, stars, etc, then later added the 18 foot megatrees, and have continued to grow over the last 5 years.
How many lights are installed?
The lights are RGB LED pixels, and I use a program called xLights to do all the programming. In our Halloween show, we had approximately 35,000 pixels, and for Christmas we are just shy of 50,000.
How long does it take to set up a show?
Christmas setup starts on November 1st every year. As we take a Halloween prop down, we replace it with a Christmas prop. So down comes a spider, and up goes a snowflake, etc. In the yard, we take down the tombstones and replace them with candy canes or minitrees. It’s a nice one for one swap, and it takes every spare moment we have to get the show up and running for “first lights” on Thanksgiving night. Programming is a year round hobby, and this is what takes the longest. It’s always the goal to add at least 12 new songs every year, so that people aren’t coming to see the same boring, stagnant show from years past. This year we have debuted 20 new songs, and the show runs for 2 hours, and loops twice per night until 10PM. We also run a “B-Sides” show that runs for an hour prior to the show from 5-6PM with songs that didn’t make it into the main show. Some of these are slower songs, or songs that have been in the rotation for the past few years. Some of these are actually great, but have been used in the past, so I didn’t want to put them into the main show.
Sequencing – on average, it takes 5-10 hours per one minute of song to do a sequence. Everything is done manually, though most people think that you just play a song and everything is done automatically to the beat. Unfortunately that is not the case, but in the future with AI it will be interesting to see what is possible. There are vendors as well that sequence songs and sell them, and they range anywhere from $50 to hundreds/thousands per song depending on how detailed they are. When you buy these, you receive a zip file, and then have to map their elements to your display, along with several other things to ensure that it looks the best it can. On average, it takes about two hours to map a vendor’s sequence to our layout, setting up groups similar to what they have, and setting the render order, etc. It is time consuming, but worth it when you see the finished product. But it is also fun to create your own authentic sequences, and also being able to pick the exact song that you want as well.
Do kids use your “letters to Santa” mailbox?
We have received 40 letters to Santa this year, and Jess has taken the time to reply to every single one. Some of these letters are absolutely adorable, and it is so much fun to see the pictures that people will post on the Facebook page showing their kids when they get a letter back from Santa.
Which charity do you support through this project?
We have partnered with Believe in Tomorrow, and over the course of the last 4 years, we have raised nearly $20K for their organization. Believe in Tomorrow created a website for us on their Rallybound page, and we have a QR code on the signs in the yard, so people can scan the QR code, and donate directly to Believe in Tomorrow. It is great because they do all the work, the money goes directly to them, and we don’t have to get our hands into anything, so there is no question where the money goes.
People can donate directly at: https://believeintomorrow.app.neoncrm.com/campaigns/caine-woods-christmas-house
Caine Woods Christmas House
Address: Fountain Road at South Bay Drive - Caine Woods Ocean City, MD 21842
Instagram:Instagram.com/cainewoodschristmashouse
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