About Us

We're the Pierces (Julie and Stuart) and we have to confess that we might just be addicted to lights. When we were trying to think of a name for our show, we considered "Alpharetta Lights" but we thought that might be a little prideful. In the end we decided that they are "our" lights and we're the Pierce's so we simply call our show Pierce Lights.

People ask how we got started so here's our story. While we've had lights in the yard for many years, we didn't get into the animation until our 2013 Christmas show. We were out looking at Christmas lights and we saw a show with leaping arches. Julie said, "I want some of those for our yard." I said, "I have no clue how to do it but I'll see if I can figure out how to do them." I found Light-O-Rama and bought one of their sixteen channel controllers so that we could do two arches with eight sections each of red and white lights. There was no music but they looked cool bouncing back and forth and changing between red and white.

We were proud of our arches but then we saw a show that had RGB arches. They could be any color and do way more tricks so we had to find out more. I quickly went back to google to find out how to do RGB arches. I have to confess that frustration that first year almost made us quit. While we both have information technology backgrounds it wasn't a big advantage in this case. We got some help and found out that it's not so difficult if you just have someone to get you started. As of our 2020 show we are over 50,000 lights and 86% RGB.

As the show grew we were having trouble getting everything out before we ran out of time (aka., Christmas arrived). In 2016 we decided to do Halloween lights so that we could start putting the lights out in early October. Since we're primarily RGB, most of what gets put out in October can just stay stay through Christmas.

Why?

From the beginning our show has been about one thing, celebrating the birth of Jesus. I've had people ask, "What do lights have to do with Jesus?" and my response is always "Lights are about celebration, and that's what we're doing." We try to maintain a balance of songs that are specifically about Jesus and others that don't mention Jesus but are just plain fun. Conversations with folks watching the show suggest that we've accomplished the balance.

Our goal is for the people who come to see our show to leave feeling better than when they came. There's a lot of craziness in this world and our prayer is that we will be used to provide a little bit refreshing positive energy and God will be glorified in the process.

Why This Site

The purpose of PierceLights.com is to be a source of information about how we do our show. While there are a lot of sites that share this type of information, we want to be one more voice in the mix. What we share is our perspective from what we’ve learned over the years of doing our show. The majority of this information can be accessed via the How-To tab on the menu bar above.

Here’s some stuff we think is worth checking out:

Previous Show Videos – Check out the segment lists on the Christmas Show and Halloween Show tabs to watch videos from past shows. You can also choose the segment name and see facts about each sequence. If you’ve seen the show, you may want to look here to see if you spotted all the fun details.
How-To Information – The How-To tab will provide access to all kinds of great information that might be helpful if you are thinking about doing a show of your own like:
- Glossary – A definition of terms with detail pages for many of the terms.
- Display Elements – A description of the elements you saw in our yard.

If you don't find what you're looking for, please use the Contact Us page and let us know how we can help.