Sparking Connection with Mini Hemmingson Christmas Trees

Blaine Atkins ('22) is operating on a level above the average person.

Where everyone else sees numbers and wires, he sees possibility. Where abandoned projects sit on shelves gathering dust, he sees new life.

And where others see lights twinkling on a Christmas tree, he sees the potential for connection.

Atkins, ITS technician at the Next Gen Tech Bar, did just that when he looked at the iconic Hemmingson Christmas tree and thought, “there’s more here.”

You’ve probably seen them around campus – mini Christmas trees made entirely of two circuit boards and a bunch of tiny lightbulbs. If you haven’t, it’s likely because the trees are closer in stature to a gingerbread man than the actual grandiose tree that nearly brushes the ceiling of the Hemmingson Rotunda.

No, size is not what these trees have in common.

It’s the multi-colored lights gracing each branch that connect mini-tree to big-tree and connect people across the world to Gonzaga.

Let me explain.

In 2016, former NGTB Coordinator Scott Griffith created ornaments for the Hemmingson tree that changed the Christmas game. With just a simple tweet, anyone could switch the color of the lights from their phone. The high-tech decorations ran until 2017 when, after Griffith left, the project was set aside.

It took two years, and one curious electrical engineering student named Blaine Atkins, for it to get picked up again. He saw the ornament remnants sitting on a shelf in the Tech Bar and re-coded them from scratch, bringing color-changing lights to Gonzaga once again.

“I had no idea what I was doing, but I got out a Raspberry Pi, looked up Twitter APIs, wrote some code and realized, ‘Wait, I think I can do this,’” Atkins says. “I went back to my boss the next day, two weeks before the tree went up, and he said, ‘Yeah, let’s try it.’”

A lot of foreign terms to the average person, but to Atkins it was Picasso and his paintbrush.

After that, he says everyone from the Next Gen Tech Bar including Ismael Teshome, associate director of IT Service Experience, and GUEST, were “wonderfully willing” to take a chance on a sophomore student employee. The ornaments went through a few more upgrades in the years that followed, including swapping out Twitter for a QR code that controlled the color of the lights.

Fast forward to 2022 – Atkins had graduated from Gonzaga and was living in Albuquerque, as part of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and he missed Gonzaga. When Christmas rolled around, Atkins hung a strip of lights in his kitchen, and using his IT superpowers, connected them to the Hemmingson tree.

That meant every time someone used the QR code to change the color of the tree in Spokane, the lights in Atkins’ kitchen changed with it, 1,300 miles away.

Atkins loved the feeling of connection he got from watching the lights change and came up with another idea – a mini Christmas tree!

“It was a combination of me wanting to feel connected to Gonzaga from afar and then wondering how I can bring that to the people I love,” he laughs and adds, “And I’m curious about designing circuit boards, so this project was a fun combination of those three things.”

Atkins returned to Gonzaga in 2023, this time on staff as an ITS technician. That year, he placed 12 tiny trees across campus, sold eight others and even mailed some to his parents and his first programming teacher all the way in the Philippines.The trees have racked up some pretty impressive data in the meantime. Last year, the lights changed 20,000 times by more than 600 people.

And they just keep growing. This year, Atkins says they’ve added a few more to the 12 already around campus and requests for the trees have more than doubled with 19 preorders.

Current student employees have also put their skills to good use, programming new modes that coordinate with their names and a color scheme of their choosing. If you’re curious, stop by the Next Gen Tech Bar, ask someone about their secret light mode and see what happens when you type it in.

Atkins is zapping new energy into the wires that connect Gonzaga, on a circuit board shaped like a Christmas tree.

“The most special thing about creating these,” he says, “is that it combines what’s technically possible with what sparks people’s joy and excitement.”

There are still a few trees left! If you’d like to buy one contact atkinsb@gonzaga.edu.