Vandalism is a concern since your display is high profile in your community. Staying up all night with a shotgun is not the most practical idea but very effective. Using a paintball gun instead of the shotgun will at least keep the evil doer alive. There are other options.
- Use a rope or chain and thread it through all of your outdoor Christmas pieces.
- Turn on the flood lights when the display is turned off. Evil doers hate light.
- Add cameras to the front of your house and advertise it.
- Ask your local law enforcement agency to make extra passes by your display.
It’s pretty depressing to check your display in the morning and see someone has removed a part of it are decided to damage a portion. No one has been able to explain why people do this and no one ever admits to doing any vandalism. I wish I had the answer.
The low-tech solution is to bathe your display with floodlights during the off-hours. Put up a lot of signs saying high-voltage is present at all times and if you have a large outdoor dog, drag the dog house around to the front of the house, make it part of the light display and have your dog keep an eye on things.
The high tech solution is to use motion sensing floodlights available from the home center or mount video cameras and record what’s going on. Any lead you can give to the law enforcement agency after an incident is very useful.
An expensive but very effective option is to have your police department park one of their cruisers in your driveway.
Finally, if you do suffer vandalism, contact the police and then ask a neighbor to get in touch with the news media. It’s a great human interest story and you might get lucky if the evil-doer feels guilty about what has been done.