Carrick family see the light with Christmas charity display

From this week’s Galway City Tribune – When the two strings of fairy lights Lurgan Park resident James Carrick put up for Christmas 2018 were battered by the weather, the software engineer decided he was done with outdoor decorations.

Fast forward two years and his house looks like something out of a child’s imagination of Christmas, drawing flocks of visitors to see the Carrick Family Light Show which the Cisco software engineer first created last year.

“When that happened, I walked in the door and said to Lisagh [his wife], ‘that’s it, we’re not doing Christmas lights anymore’,” he laughs.

“A week later, I was on YouTube and I came across a guy that does this stuff and I was hooked,” explains James, looking on at the thousands of individual bulbs that reacting to a playlist of Christmas hits including everything from Elton John to the Grinch theme.

He ordered in the lights from around the world, getting packages from China, the UK and the US throughout 2019, and began creating what has to be one of the best-decorated houses in the country.

The show runs every evening between 6pm and 8pm at half-hourly intervals, with a special show for kids on Sundays starting at 4.15pm.

James, who was born and raised in Mervue, says he spent about 900 hours putting all the parts together in his garden shed, bringing together countless bulbs and screens that include one made up of 109,000 individual pixels.

“It’s the timing and programming of the show that’s the time-sensitive part – you’re sitting down for hours at a computer every evening and when everyone else is gone to bed, you’re still there at 3am,” he says.

(Photo: James Carrick at his house in Renmore)
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