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The holidays are often the only time of year that I have time to work on projects - cold, rainy (or snowy!) weather with long dark nights are perfect for indoor techy projects!
This year was a better in terms of being able to create more projects throughout the year, but the holiday challenge has pretty much become a tradition for me now, so I obviously had to build something festive again this year! 
Several years ago I bought a handful of soldering practice kits - this was back when shipping was super cheap, and the kits were also super cheap. Shipping was still the kind that required patience, so often by the time the kits arrived I'd have forgotten why I bought them 
I like these kits - they're a little bit like building a puzzle.
Among those kits were several LED Christmas trees - nice and colourful, and easy to assemble. They're also easy to power - I can light the whole tree with a simple 3v button battery, or with power from a little dev board.
I also at one point bought a few kits that flash LEDs when sound is heard. I think I actually bought them because I needed the little connectors for some other project. And then they were the wrong style of connector 
For this one I only soldered on one LED for testing, but later I cut one leg of that LED so that the tree would light more brightly.
For the power connector I just added some patch wires, and in one of the LED positions I added a connector so I could power the tree from it there.
I also had this music box lying around - it plays a little bit of Christmas music that reminds me of when I was little, so I kept it. I think it had chocolates in it at one point, which left a nice big open area in which to place the electronic parts.
At first I had planned to use a Pi Pico to detect sound with an electret mic, or with a piezo buzzer, but I was not able to get that circuit working at all! Luckily I still had that little sound flashing soldering kit that I had randomly bought years ago!
So I soldered things up and connected it to the tree.
And after putting it all together:
I notice now that things are a little bit crooked there. ah well, I shall once again have to embrace the imperfection 
It turned out kind of cool though:
But you need the video to fully appreciate it:
Happy Holidays, everyone!
And Happy Hacking the Holidays!
-Nico
