It’s the start of the festive season, and so people are unpacking their trees, putting up lights, and doing the same old Christmas decoration thing as last year, and the year before that.
But we’re geeks, and we have old electronics. That includes old TVs and monitors, which means you can do something a little more creative thanks to the infinite scope of the screen.
Turning it into a looping festive art display
Even if you don’t have a smart TV, you can probably still easily set up some Christmas-themed visuals to produce a Santa-friendly vibe in your home.
If you have a flatscreen TV from before the smart TV revolution, it probably has a USB port and can play back common formats like MP4 video. All you have to do is go to a site like Pexels and download free Christmas videos. Then put them on a flash drive in a folder, and set your TV’s player to repeat the videos when it gets to the end.
Unfortunately, since different “dumb” TVs have media players with different conventions and controls, you’ll have to look up how yours works, or experiment with it.
If you have an old smart TV, or you have a spare streaming box you can hook up to your old “dumb” TV, then you can either still use your own video files on a flash drive (unless it’s an Apple TV) combined with a video player app. Alternatively, there should be no shortage of Christmas-themed video compilations on services like YouTube that are hours long. Like this Christmas ambiance video
Of course, if you don’t have YouTube Premium then your video could be interrupted by ads, but maybe it’s worth paying for just one month?
If you have an old CRT TV around, then you can do something with an even cozier aesthetic. I use an HDMI to composite converter to connect my Chromebook to my Sony Trinitron CRT TV and the results look quite nice.
Using it as a virtual fireplace
I live in a part of the world where it’s summer during the holidays, so even though I actually have a fireplace I can’t exactly use it during that time. Besides, Santa needs to come down my chimney, and I don’t want him getting burning ash and wood all over my home library. Even if you live up where it snows over Christmas, you may not have a fireplace at all, but luckily we can still get those vibes using a virtual fireplace.
If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can pick one of the professionally recorded fireplaces in the Fireplace in Your Home series. These sound great if you have a good set of speakers to connect to your old TV. Of course, YouTube provides plenty of options too, like this incredibly popular fireplace video recorded at 4K/60, which makes it look incredibly lifelike!
If you’re using an old spare TV for this purpose, you can position it low on the floor at the same height a real fireplace would be, perhaps next to your Christmas tree, with very little risk of burning it and all the gifts underneath it down.
Creating a dedicated Christmas music video list
Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without some appropriate music, and these days most of us are playing back mega streaming playlists with music to set the mood in the background. However, if you have an old TV to dedicate to the job, why not play a list of Christmas music videos instead?
Again, YouTube provides, with lots of options such as this playlist of Vevo music videos with top Christmas hits starting with (I’m so sorry) Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You.
I’ve also found that the Spotify app on TVs has excellent-quality music videos, and there are plenty of awesome video playlists compiled by the community, including for Christmas.
Of course, nothing stops you from taking the time to compile your own list of Christmas songs. You can take a shortcut or really put your heart into it.
Using it as a rotating family holiday photo frame
Possibly the most straightforward thing you can do with that old TV for Christmas is load it up with family photos, and set them on a carousel or slideshow of some kind. If you have family visiting over the holidays, you can ask everyone to contribute photos. Heck, maybe it’s even better if you ask the people who can’t be with you for the holidays to send photos as well, so they can be there in spirit.
As to how you can pull this off, there are many options. With old dumb flatscreen TVs, you can usually just copy a bunch of photos onto a flash drive and use the same media player function you used for videos. If you have an old smart TV, then there are various apps that work as slideshow players, and often you can connect them to cloud photo accounts like Google Photos. This makes it dead easy to create what’s essentially an enormous photo frame.
While you’re at it, if you have any smart speakers, you can use them to spice up Christmas, and don’t forget with more people (and kids) over for the holidays, you can still use that old TV to watch classic Christmas movies.
