{"id":1970,"date":"2025-12-09T00:29:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T04:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/?p=1970"},"modified":"2025-12-09T23:10:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T03:10:00","slug":"silly-sideprojects-the-lighting-up-crotch-snowman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/?p=1970","title":{"rendered":"Silly Sideprojects: The Lighting-Up-Crotch Snowman!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Finally, a blinky project of the scale I can actually bite off these days (unlike pre-kids<\/a>), but it requires a bit of backstory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My wife’s mom absolutely loves Christmas, and like many families, their Christmas is full of tradition. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without egg dish, Dead Thelma Neuboldt’s Merry Christmas Chicken in the ceremonial orange crock, a troll Christmas tree1<\/a><\/sup>, new holiday jammies or 18 kinds of cookie. Among those traditions is a light-up table decoration, formally:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Acrylics Aglow, Illuminating the Ice – from the JC Penney Home Collection<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

…or informally, as my kids would gleefully announce whenever they saw it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It’s the lighting-up-crotch snowman<\/em>!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Illuminating the Ice<\/em> features two translucent ice skaters with flowing scarves and other proper winter attire with snowman heads and carrot noses, with a pine tree in the background. To the neverending mirth of our young ones, each of these figures is lit by color-changing LEDs with, for the skaters, somewhat unfortunate placement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Table
Illuminating the Ice, the warm glow of the holidays<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As bona-fide family holiday tradition with the added bonus of being a bit cheesy and very slightly NSFW, Illuminating the Ice<\/em> has been mailed around as their own kids moved out and the family Christmas gathering place rotated, finally landing at my sister-in-law’s, where it was probably decided that subjecting this now-rare heirloom to the whims of mail carriers is too much of a gamble, and there it has remained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whew. That’s a lot of setup. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, to keep some semblance of the tradition alive when Christmas happens in our neck of the woods, I built my own homage to the decoration that’s fairly well smaller and easy to store for the other 11 months of the year, but preserves that one critical feature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"One
The pint-size homebrew version of Lighting-Up-Crotch Snowman<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If it looks like I cheesily snagged some 3D printable models off Thingiverse and epoxied them to the top of a peanut butter jar lid, you’re sadly mistaken. They are hot-glued<\/em> to the peanut butter jar lid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The actual construction is more-or-less self-explanatory, but the bill of materials is roughly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Printed Models:<\/p>\n\n\n\n