The sounds of rocking Christmas tunes could still be heard Wednesday evening in the courthouse square, for those who tuned to the proper FM frequency. Fifty thousand LED lights were programmed in sync with the music.
Chad Boone at Bass-X Autosound, the man who programmed the new light show for the City of Great Bend, said the exhibit will start coming down Thursday, but it will be back for the next holiday season. It took him about 40 hours to program an 11-minute show, Boone said during a program at the Great Bend Noon Kiwanis Club.
The centerpiece of the exhibit was a 40-foot “tree” made of 12,000 moving lights.
The Christmas light has come a long way since Thomas Edison created the first strand of electric lights in 1880, Boone said. According to the National Library of Congress, Edward H. Johnson put the first string of electric Christmas tree lights together in 1882. But before 1903, the cost to light a Christmas tree would have been about $2,000 in today’s dollars.
Today, that’s about the cost of lighting an entire home with a synchronized music program, Boone said. The exhibit north of the courthouse cost $25,000.
City Administrator Howard Partington said the city council approved the purchase last year and included it in the budget. People were already talking about the music and light display in front of Chad and Stephanie Boone’s home in the 3100 block of 27th St., which has now expanded to other houses in the block.
After seeing Boone’s design and the work on the City display, Partington and his wife purchased their own light display for their home in the 2500 block of McKinley St. Partington said they chose not to add music because they didn’t want to tie up traffic.
Partington said the city’s exhibit was a “cool addition” to Great Bend’s Trail of Lights. “I got more comments on that than about anything we’ve done,” he said. “We’re real pleased with it.”
Light-emitting diode lights are the most efficient bulbs available today. Boone said that while top quality LED lights are still expensive, they are brighter than incandescent lights, last longer and use less electricity. The Cosmos Lighting Technology-brand bulbs he used combine red, green and blue to create virtually any color imaginable, and they can be programmed within 1/500th of a second, to twinkle, shimmer and shine to match the beats of the songs.
“You want a song that’s pretty upbeat, so you can have a lot of movement to it,” Boone said. The music was broadcast over a low-wattage FM frequency, with a broadcast reach of less than 2 miles so it would not break Federal Communications Commission rules.

The music could be heard over the FM radios of those who stopped on the north side of the courthouse square to watch the show, and it was broadcast over the downtown speakers the Saturday after Thanksgiving, following the Home for the Holidays parade.


The lights purchased by the city can be reused next year, and for many years to come, Boone said, although the council may want to approve new songs or additions in the future.