East Quogue Engineer's Dazzling Light Show Brings Joy and Raises Money for St. Jude Children's Hospital

​When Joseph Commisso was a child, growing up in East Quogue, he remembers making a trip during the holiday season to a house in North Babylon that put on an incredibly over-the-top Christmas lights display. The house was decked out with tons of decorations.

It left an impression on him.

“I remember feeling the magic of Christmas,” Commisso, now 24, said earlier this week.

For the past few years, he’s been the one making that kind of Christmas magic in his hometown. Since 2017, Commisso has set up a holiday light show, complete with coordinating music, at the home of his mother, Tina Commisso, in the Pinesfield neighborhood of East Quogue. It started in 2017, with a modest display, but over the years, Commisso has made it more complex, with more and more sets of lights each year, in an explosion of different shapes, sizes and colors.

Commisso now works as an engineer, and those skills have allowed him to set up the intricate lights display at his mother’s East Quogue home. For years, East Quogue residents and visitors from nearby, of all ages, show up at 10 Oakland Lane to experience the same kind of thrill and holiday magic that Commisso enjoyed as a child.

On a red and white candy-striped pole on the street near the house, Commisso set up a large green button with instructions above it that read “Press for Music.” Upon pressing the button, instrumental holiday music begins to pour out of a white speaker set up below the button on the pole, and the light show begins.

The display includes more than 12,000 lights, Commisso said, and he starts working on the project of hanging them and coordinating them in early November.

“This past Thanksgiving, I was outside all day setting it up,” he said.

A whole community exists online of people like Commisso, who love to set up intricate and dazzling light displays, synced up to holiday music. Commisso consults with that group of holiday light show hobbyists for tips and ideas, and used software designed specifically for that purpose to help put it all together.

“It’s almost like an Excel spreadsheet,” he said. “You have audio, and a bunch of columns and rows to put effects on whatever lights you want to turn on. You figure out what songs would work, and then it’s just a matter of sitting down and figuring out what lights you want to come on at a certain time.”

Commisso uses custom-built controllers that allow him to change the colors of the lights as well.

It’s a labor of love, inspired by his longtime love of experiencing and now creating holiday magic.

“It’s a lot of work. But it’s fun,” he said. “All the work you put in makes it worth it when you see people outside enjoying, and see kids dancing along to the music.”

Commisso said it’s not just kids who enjoy the show.

“I’ve had a lot of people say that I’ve been part of their family traditions for years now, and it makes me happy to be a part of that,” he said. “There was one night when an elderly woman with dementia came and she was really enjoying the lights. So it’s not just kids, it’s older people too.”

Commisso said the light display was particularly popular during the COVID pandemic, when people were eager to do something special for the holidays that felt safe but memorable. That year, people started to ask him if there was any charitable aspect connected to the lights display.

“It got me thinking that maybe we should raise money,” he said.

Commisso and his mom settled on choosing St. Jude Children’s Hospital as the beneficiary for anyone who comes to the light show and feels compelled to make a donation. A sign with a QR code for donating is on the same post that has the push button and the music speaker.

“I figured it would be a great charity because they help families, and there are families out there who don’t get to enjoy the holiday with their kids being sick.”

Tina Commisso said they collected around $1,000 for St. Jude last year, and they’ve been collecting donations for the organization since the start of COVID.

She said she’s thrilled to make donations to the organization as well, and is happy about the joy the light display brings to people who come to see it. Having random visitors or strangers show up at their house during the weeks and days before Christmas isn’t something that bothers her.

“People show up and sometimes they’ll dance on the lawn,” she said. “I love it.”