Carving pumpkins by hand is hot, sweaty, messy work, and a great way to slice your way into a critical artery. Why not let a water jet do it for you? It’ll be cleaner and more precise to boot, and [Jo_Journey] is here to show us how. 

Obviously, you’ll need a water jet machine, there’s no getting around that. You’ll also still have to do the basic preparation of the pumpkin yourself—cutting a porthole into the top and mucking it out is your job. With that done, you must then mount the pumpkin on two metal rods which will be used to mount it in the water jet machine’s working area.

You can then create a vector file of your design, and use your chosen software to generate the G-code to run the water jet. [Jo_Journey] uses Scribe, and recommends cutting at a speed of around 200 in/min at low pressure. Remember, it’s pumpkin you’re cutting, not high-strength steel.

There is some inaccuracy, of course—your pumpkin’s surface is not a flat plane, after all—but the results are good enough for most Halloween-related purposes. Even despite the geometrical issues, though, [Jo_Journey] shows us that you can get pleasantly sharp edges on your design. That’s very hard to achieve by hand!

We do love a good holiday hack around these parts, even if it’s out of season. If you’ve been cooking up your own pumpkinous plans, don’t hesitate to let us know! Earlier is sometimes better—after all, who has time to hack together a project if you’ve just read about it on October 29?

The miniature Christmas village is a tradition in many families — a tiny idyllic world filled happy people, shops, and of course, snow. It’s common to see various miniature buildings for sale around the holidays just for this purpose, and since LEDs are small and cheap, they’ll almost always have some switch on the bottom to light up the windows.

This year, [Braden Sunwold] and his wife started their own village with an eye towards making it a family tradition. But to his surprise, the scale lamp posts they bought to dot along their snowy main street were hollow and didn’t actually light up. Seeing it was up to him to save Christmas, [Braden] got to work adding LEDs to the otherwise inert lamps.

Now in a pinch, this project could have been done with nothing more than some coin cells and a suitably sized LED. But seeing as the lamp posts were clearly designed in the Victorian style, [Braden] felt they should softly flicker to mimic a burning gas flame. Blinking would be way too harsh, and in his own words, look more like a Halloween decoration.

This could have been an excuse to drag out a microcontroller. But instead, [Braden] did as any good little Hackaday reader should do, and called on Old Saint 555 to save Christmas. After doing some research, he determined that a trio of 555s rigged as relaxation oscillators could be used to produce quasi-random triangle waves. When fed into a transistor controlling the LED, the result would be a random flickering instead of a more aggressive strobe effect. It took a little tweaking of values, but eventually he got it locked down and sent away to have custom PCBs made of the circuit.

With the flicker driver done, the rest of the project was pretty simple. Since the lamp posts were already hollow, feeding the LEDs up into them was easy enough. The electronics went into a 3D printed base, and we particularly liked the magnetic connectors [Braden] used so that the lamps could easily be taken off the base when it was time to pack the village away.

We can’t wait to see what new tricks [Braden] uses to bring the village alive for Christmas 2025. Perhaps the building lighting could do with a bit of automation?

If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the only thing hardware hackers love more than a device festooned with buttons is one that’s covered in LEDs — so it’s no surprise that this “Mr Christmas” jukebox caught the eye of [Roberts Retro]. But while the holiday gadget might have been mildly entertaining in its stock configuration, he quickly realized that what it really needed was an ESP32 retrofit. After all, what good are all those buttons and LEDs if you can’t bend them to your will?

For the first half of the video, [Robert] treats us to a detailed teardown of the device, which as you might imagine, is largely hollow inside. This gave him plenty of room to graft in new hardware, which is really the best gift any of us could hope to find under the tree. In addition to the ESP32 development board, the jukebox also received a number of WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs, and a DFPlayer module to handle music playback.

With all the buttons wired up to inputs on the ESP32, [Robert] can reconfigure the jukebox to do pretty much whatever he wants with just changes to the software. In the video, he demonstrates how the buttons can be used to trigger the playback of individual songs stored on the DFPlayer’s SD card, which essentially replicates it’s stock functionality. A few lines of changed code later, those same buttons can be used to control devices via Home Assistant.

To get into the holiday spirit, [Roberts Retro] shows off the completed jukebox controlling his ESP-enabled LEGO train set — another of his festive upgrades that we covered back in 2022.

LEGO make lots of neat floral arrangements these days, and even little Christmas trees, too. While they’re fun to build out of tiny little blocks, they’re a little small for use as your main Christmas tree. Sadly, a bigger version simply doesn’t exist in the LEGO catalog, so if that’s your desire, you’ll have to build your own—as [Ruth] and [Ellis] did!

The concept behind the build is as you’d expect. The duo effectively just 3D printed giant versions of LEGO pieces, with which they then assembled a large Christmas tree. It sounds very straightforward, but scaling an existing LEGO design up by six times tends to come with some complications. A tactical decision was made early on to ease proceedings—the original LEGO tree had a large brown base that would take lots of printing. This was eliminated in the hopes that it would speed the build significantly. The long plastic shafts that supported the original design were also replaced with steel shafts since printing them would have been incredibly difficult to do well.

The rest of the video demonstrates the huge amount of work that went into actually 3D printing and assembling this thing. It’s pretty great to watch, and you’ll learn a lot along the way.

We’ve seen other creators try similar projects, where they 3D print their own building blocks from scratch. It normally turns out much harder than expected! No surprise when you think about all the engineering that went into perfecting LEGO all those years ago.

Thanks to [Jonathan] for the tip!

Each Christmas, [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], and [Johan Wheeler] (going by ‘the Janky Jingle Crew’)—set themselves the challenge of outdoing their previous creations. Last year’s CH32 Fireplace brought an animated LED fire to life with CH32V003 microcontrollers.

This year, they’ve gone a step further with the North Pole Circuit, a holiday project that combines magnetic propulsion, festive decorations, and a bit of engineering flair. Inspired by a miniature speedway based on Friedrich Gauss’ findings, the North Pole Circuit includes sleighs and reindeer that glide along a custom PCB track, a glowing village with flickering lights, and a buzzer to play Christmas tunes.

The propulsion system works using the Lorentz force, where vertical magnets interact with PCB traces to produce motion. A two-phase design, similar to a stepper motor, ensures smooth operation, while guard rails maintain stability on curves. A separate CH32V003 handles lighting and synchronized jingles, creating a cohesive festive display. As we mentioned in the article on their last year’s creation, going from a one-off to a full batch will make one rethink the joy of repetitive production. Consider the recipients of these tiny Christmas cards quite the lucky ones. We deem this little gift a keeper to put on display when Christmas rolls around again.

This annual tradition highlights the Crew’s knack for combining fun and engineering. Curious about the details or feeling inspired to create your own? Explore the full details and files on their GitHub.