For the past two seasons, we’ve driven around a nearby neighborhood and recorded the quantity and “quality” of all holiday lights displays. The results for the 2022 season and a comparison with the previous year are shared in this brief StoryMap, below.

Apart from being a fun new holiday tradition, I wanted to do this project to get a bit familiar with the ArcGIS QuickCapture app, and to take advantage of the new “Bloom” effects available in the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer. In total, we recorded more than 1500 points across the two years. I binned all the data into five acre hex bins to cook a bit of ambiguity into the results and mask what specific homes were rated what. Our rating process was almost entirely arbitrary and very much influenced by personal bias. Light-up dogs were valued highly.