Petaluma teen wows neighborhood with holiday light show

From his control tower directly above the garage, Chad Dunbar assumes the director’s chair on one of Petaluma’s hottest holiday shows.

His picture window is perfectly positioned to give the teen-age DJ a commanding view of both his production and the steady caravan of cars that clog Cabernet Court from dusk to 10 o’clock every night for a glimpse of his seven-minute, animated sound-and-light show that leaves many breathless for an encore.

For most Americans, outdoor Christmas lights originally meant a simple string of multicolored lights under the eaves. But over the years the bar has increasingly been raised, with the most committed turning it into a zany sweepstakes to transform entire cul-de-sacs into yuletide attractions.

The practice was famously spoofed 20 years ago in National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation,” in which a hapless Clark Griswold sends the local nuclear power plant onto auxiliary power.

Now, 19-year Dunbar, a computer geek and Santa Rosa Junior College student who supports his expensive hobby doing tech support for a local company, has taken the stakes to a whole new level, with 50,000 lights. Proud Dads with their staple guns and strings of static lights have reason to be afraid — very, very afraid.

Dunbar has been working since February to mount his technical tour de force. It’s a kind of show one might expect to see in Vegas or an amusement park, with lights carefully choreographed to blink, twinkle and fade in and out in various schemes of red, blue, green and white, all in synch with a custom-mixed soundtrack of Christmas tunes.

Dunbar gamely works with the venue available to him at the moment — his parent’s two-story tract house in east Petaluma.

It’s a show free of giant blow-up snowmen. No animated Santas on the roof, lighted reindeer or painted cut-outs of elves. Dunbar has created magic with music and lights alone.

“You have to have a creative mind,” said Dunbar, who cooked up his first sound-and-light extravaganza for Halloween 2008 with his pal Austin Allen as part of Allen’s senior project. They used the Dunbar house because it was larger.

It proved so popular, however, that the pair, working as AClights.com, followed it up with a Christmas show and another Halloween production two months ago.

But last year’s 16,000 Christmas lights was a blink compared to this year’s 50,000-bulb spectacle. That is double the 25,000 boasted by the fictional Griswold. School demands forced Allen to withdraw, but Dunbar’s friends Johnny Repp, Elizabeth Butcher, Courtney Hopkins and Joe Bloom pitched in to ensure the show went on. It’s one of 15 homes competing for votes on the Petaluma Visitor Center’s City of Lights Driving Tour.

“It is complicated,” Dunbar said, his cell ringing to the original “Mario Brothers’” Nintendo theme, an anthem to young guys who came of age after the millennium. “It’s like choreographing people dancing, but they’re not people. They’re lights. You’ve got to figure out what their role is and what part they play.”

The show requires three-quarters of a mile of custom-made cable and a professional electrical upgrading of the home — 20 new circuits — to permit all that drain without shorting out the house.

And there’s a real-time Webcam so people can check the court’s traffic conditions and a real radio transmitter in Dunbar’s bedroom window that allows viewers to enjoy the show from the comfort of their heated cars while tuning in to 96.3 FM — a legal signal that doesn’t extend much beyond the court.

“We didn’t put any limits on his freedom and talent,” Wayne Dunbar said of his techno-prodigy son, who has been an event DJ since age 10. “The only thing we objected to last year was the number of cords running through the house.”

That’s been taken care of. But be careful if you enter the garage. The floor is completely covered in coiling cords connecting up to five control boards with a combined 80 channels that communicate with the computer in Dunbar’s bedroom. A local electrician and home light enthusiast who liked what Dunbar is doing volunteered to help rig up the wiring safely and separate from the house power so there won’t be repeat of last year, when the inside lights faintly flickered in synch to the outside show.

Dunbar uses Light-O-Rama, a computerized lighting system that allows homeowners to put on professional home light shows. It’s still just a small niche of the home lighting market, although it has a growing following among other techno-geeks who are competing now not just for drive-bys but video views on YouTube.

It takes both computer and electrical savvy as well as a degree of creativity to program so many strings of lights in four different colors to blink, fade, shimmer and twinkle, racing from the eaves to a pair of 13-foot “Mega Trees” Dunbar and friends built out of PVC wire, around two grand arches and over a series of smaller Christmas trees fashioned from tomato cages.

“I raided Lowe’s,” Dunbar said. “I called them back in September and said, ‘OK. I want to buy 397 boxes of lights. Can you do this for me?’”

He laboriously choreographed the music, a mix put together by a professional beat mixer who is a friend of his uncle. The music is bits of the hit “Music Box Dancer,” the symphonic metal-sound of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and, at the request of dad Wayne and mom Lisa, a little Mannheim Steamroller.

The wizard of 1623 Cabernet Court has invested more than $2,500 of his own savings just for lights and equipment; his former co-producer Allen put in a fairly equal amount.

After supporters and fans began leaving donations, the Dunbars relented and put out a donation box to help offset the PG&E cost, which Dunbar estimates to be about $400 extra for December.

Last Christmas, with 16,000 lights, it was about $120. Dunbar said the cost is not as high as conventional lights because his lights are blinking and not on all at once. And the show, which loops continuously through the evening, does have a two-minute break between runs. This year, Dunbar rigged up a set of buttons so children during intermission can control the lights themselves.

Knowing that any trouble or complaints might shut him down, Dunbar has taken care to be conscientious toward his neighbors, sometimes directing traffic away from driveways and being on the alert for other hazards, such as the time someone’s car broke down in the middle of the street. He was ready with jumper cables to keep the line moving.

“Chad is very considerate,” said Jim Eaton, whose house is directly across the street. “When my sister comes up (to visit) and sleeps in the front, he makes sure it’s down by 10 o’clock. It’s pretty awesome. And all the neighborhood kids enjoy it.”

Police Lt. Tim Lyons said nearly a week into the December show there have been no complaints to police.

Dunbar said it’s the joy of giving seven minutes of pleasure to thousands of strangers that motivates him.

“It’s so much fun seeing people being happy through these rough times,” he said while surveying his own show from the street. “We’re going through a recession. People are not in the best mood maybe. But this is an escape for them. That’s the coolest feeling.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.