During the 2021/2022 holiday seasons, we drove around a nearby neighborhood with some hot chocolate and recorded the quantity and “quality” of all holiday lights displays. The results and a comparison of the two years 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 both years. I binned the data into five acre hexagons to cook a bit of ambiguity into the results and mask ratings for specific homes. Our rating process was almost entirely arbitrary and very much influenced by personal bias. Light-up dogs were valued highly. If the decorations involved somebody getting up on the roof, a baseline score of 3 (out of 5) was automatically awarded.